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History Books » World History

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Vermeer's Hat: The seventeenth century and the dawn of the global world by Timothy Brook

“He chose the perspective of writing about some of Vermeer’s paintings, and taking a microscopic look at those paintings and the objects depicted in them. He then followed out from those objects to tell a story of the 16th and 17th centuries, especially 17th Century global history. Each chapter starts with a different object. There’s a beaver hat, there’s smoking, there’s the porcelain, there’s the Turkish carpets. It’s a book written for a wide audience.” Maxine Berg , Historian

The Return of Martin Guerre by Natalie Zemon Davis

“This book tells the fascinating story of Martin Guerre: a mysterious tale of imposture, love, and honour among sixteenth-century French peasants. It is a brilliant bit of historical detective work and a captivating read that plunges the reader deep into the world of the past.” Suzannah Lipscomb , Historian

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Last updated: April 23, 2024

World history is an increasingly exciting subject for books. In a sign of the vitality of the field, it was a book of global history covering several millennia about the human history of the oceans—David Abulafia's The Boundless Sea —that won the UK's most prestigious prize, the Wolfson History Prize, in 2020. Books taking a more global, long-term perspective have also become bestsellers, like Sapiens , by the Israeli historian Yuval Harari, and The Silk Roads , by Oxford historian Peter Frankopan (now also available in an illustrated edition for kids/teenagers ).

The focus on greater diversity in publishing also bodes well for readers interested in learning the history of the world, as books about countries and peoples not previously given much attention are awarded prestigious prizes. Below, we’ve collected together all our books relating to world history themes, as well as all our interviews about the history of particular countries or regions (we also have specialist sections devoted to American history , British history , German history and Russian history ).

The best books on Global History , recommended by Maxine Berg

The great divergence: china, europe, and the making of the modern world economy by kenneth pomeranz, cotton: the fabric that made the modern world by giorgio riello, the city of blue and white: chinese porcelain and the early modern world by anne gerritsen, horizons: the global origins of modern science by james poskett.

From the Indian cottons that were traded around Asia and Africa in the Middle Ages, to the global dominance of the blue-and-white pottery of Jingdezhen, historian Maxine Berg introduces five books that transformed our understanding of the past millennium and are significant milestones in the development of the vibrant field of global history.

The best books on Global History , recommended by Felipe Fernández-Armesto

The bible the new oxford annotated bible, the muqaddimah by ibn khaldun, the communist manifesto by friedrich engels & karl marx, a study of history by arnold toynbee, science and civilisation in china by joseph needham.

Embracing global history allows us to see humans with a much clearer perspective. Historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto introduces us to some of the trailblazing books in the field, starting in the 2nd century BCE.

The best books on Big History , recommended by Toby Ord

Maps of time: an introduction to big history by david christian, origins: how the earth made us by lewis dartnell, the five ages of the universe: inside the physics of eternity by fred adams & gregory laughlin, pale blue dot: a vision of the human future in space by carl sagan, diaspora by greg egan.

'Big history' looks at history on the timescale of the Earth and the universe, rather than just the short period of time that humanity has been around. Here, Toby Ord , a moral philosopher at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, recommends books to get a handle on it, and explains why now is a critical time for Homo sapiens.

‘Big history’ looks at history on the timescale of the Earth and the universe, rather than just the short period of time that humanity has been around. Here, Toby Ord, a moral philosopher at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, recommends books to get a handle on it, and explains why now is a critical time for Homo sapiens.

The best books on Empires , recommended by Peter Fibiger Bang

The roman empire: economy, society and culture by peter garnsey & richard saller, the crisis of empire in mughal north india, awadh and punjab, 1707-48 by muzzafar alam, a translucent mirror: history and identity in qing imperial ideology by pamela kyle crossley, empire: the russian empire and its rivals (from the 16th century to the present) by dominic lieven, the birth of the modern world 1780-1914 by c.a. bayly.

Empires are a reflection of the fact some states are stronger than others and are by no means just a relic of the past, says Peter Fibiger Bang , historian of empire and world history at the University of Copenhagen. Here, he recommends books on a variety of empires, from the ancient Romans to the Mughal, Qing and Russian empires and explains what it is that made some empires so durable and resilient across the centuries.

Empires are a reflection of the fact some states are stronger than others and are by no means just a relic of the past, says Peter Fibiger Bang, historian of empire and world history at the University of Copenhagen. Here, he recommends books on a variety of empires, from the ancient Romans to the Mughal, Qing and Russian empires and explains what it is that made some empires so durable and resilient across the centuries.

Peter Frankopan on History

Five plays: ivanov, the seagull, uncle vanya, three sisters, and the cherry orchard by anton chekhov, de administrando imperio by constantine porphyrogenitus, the alexiad by anna komnene, ibn fadlan and the land of darkness: arab travellers in the far north by ibn fadlan, landscapes of power by caterina franchi (editor), maximilian lau (editor) & morgan di rodi (editor).

What kind of books should we read to get a broader sense of history? Peter Frankopan ,  professor of global history at Oxford University, talks us through the books that inspired him.

What kind of books should we read to get a broader sense of history? Peter Frankopan,  professor of global history at Oxford University, talks us through the books that inspired him.

The Best History Books to Take on Holiday , recommended by Suzannah Lipscomb

Elizabeth i by helen castor, king leopold's ghost by adam hochschild, the last tsar: the life and death of nicholas ii by edvard radzinsky, operation thunderbolt by saul david.

Which history books are ideal to take on holiday, authoritative and yet entertaining? We turned to historian Suzannah Lipscomb —whose most recent book, The Voices of Nîmes , uncovers the lives of ordinary women in Languedoc in early modern France—for her top five.

Which history books are ideal to take on holiday, authoritative and yet entertaining? We turned to historian Suzannah Lipscomb—whose most recent book, The Voices of Nîmes , uncovers the lives of ordinary women in Languedoc in early modern France—for her top five.

The best books on Hidden History , recommended by Mike Dash

The tailor-king by anthony arthur, marpingen: apparitions of the virgin mary in bismarckian germany by david blackbourn, the big con by david w maurer, up in the old hotel by joseph mitchell, the secret lives of trebitsch lincoln by bernard wasserstein.

The best stories from history lie beyond the margins of textbooks, says Mike Dash . He tells us about five extraordinary tales from the past, from visions of the Virgin Mary to the golden age of American con artistry.

The best stories from history lie beyond the margins of textbooks, says Mike Dash. He tells us about five extraordinary tales from the past, from visions of the Virgin Mary to the golden age of American con artistry.

The best books on The Achaemenid Persian Empire , recommended by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

The persian empire by j m cook, discovering cyrus: a persian conqueror astride the ancient world by reza zaghamee, the persian empire: a corpus of sources from the achaemenid period by amélie kuhrt, the palace of darius at susa: the great royal residence of achaemenid persia by jean perrot, creation by gore vidal.

At the height of its greatness, the Achaemenid Persian Empire was the largest empire the world had ever known. Too often it is given merely a villainous walk-on part in the heroic history of classical Greece. Here, historian Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones explains why that needs correcting, looks at its cultural achievements and discusses why the first Persian empire is worth studying in its own right and on its own terms.

The best books on The Ghana, Mali and Songhai African Empires , recommended by Michael Gomez

Golden trade of the moors: west african kingdoms in the fourteenth century by e.w. bovill, ancient ghana and mali by nehemiah levtzion, social history of timbuktu: the role of muslim scholars and notables 1400-1900 by elias saad, sunjata: a west african epic of the mande peoples by david c. conrad, timbuktu and the songhay empire: al-sa'di's ta'rikh al-sudan down to 1613 and other contemporary documents by john hunwick.

Long before the Europeans arrived in the 16th and 17th centuries, sub-Saharan West Africa saw the emergence of a series of African empires that lasted for centuries and stretched over vast swathes of the continent. They were known as the Ghana, Mali and Songhai Empires. Here, historian Michael Gomez discusses what led to their greatness, what sustained them and why they fell.

The best books on Environmental History , recommended by John R McNeill

The mortal sea: fishing the atlantic in the age of sail by w. jeffrey bolster, plutopia: nuclear families, atomic cities, and the great soviet and american plutonium disasters by kate brown, ecological imperialism by alfred crosby, the unending frontier: an environmental history of the early modern world by john f. richards, the ecology of oil: environment, labor, and the mexican revolution, 1900-1938 by myrna i. santiago.

Environmental history is the study of the relationship between society and the natural world—both in terms of human impacts on the environment, and the constraints placed upon cultures by the landscapes they live in. Here, John R. McNeill, a pioneer of the field, recommends five of the best environmental history books with ambition, engaging prose, and heft.

We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview.

This site has an archive of more than one thousand seven hundred interviews, or eight thousand book recommendations. We publish at least two new interviews per week.

Five Books participates in the Amazon Associate program and earns money from qualifying purchases.

© Five Books 2024

Best Books Hub

Reviews of The Best Books on Every Subject

20 Best World History Books (2022 Review)

September 5, 2020 by James Wilson

DISCLOSURE: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning when you click the links and make a purchase, I receive a commission. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

The history of the world is a subject that is prevalent to everyone. HIstorical events of the past are what have shaped the world today. History also helps the world find solutions to current problems that we may face. The world has existed for many years. On top of its existence, there are 195 countries to learn about. The history of each country can be discussed in hundreds and thousands of books. How do we, as a society, determine what is most important? Everday more historical artifacts, fossils, journals, and more are being discovered. There is no way to keep with everything that has happened in the past, as well as what is happening in the present… but we can try.

What are the Best World History Books to read?

The books oultined here will analyze some of the most important events in world history. They are full of great information that is both engaging and interesting. These books will help readers identify some of the most important moments in history and how they are changing the future.

Best World History Books: Our Top 20 Picks

Here are some of the best world history books that you can consider to expand your knowledge on the subject:

1. A Short History of Nearly Everything

History can be considered one subject, but it can also be divided into subcategories. There is history behind everything, so what should be learned?  A Short History of Nearly Everything  by Bill Breyson is, well, a short history of “everything.” Bryson starts at the beginning of time: how humans came to be. He goes on to discuss the greatest historical findings of anthropologists, archaeologists, mathematicians, scientists, and more. The topics in this book are quickly discussed, but that’s okay. By reading this book, people would procure basic knowledge on a number of huge events. They can then use the information they learned to consider researching on those topics extensively. Some of the world’s most asked questions are addressed in this book with history and research. This is a great read for those who can’t seem to choose a history subject to learn.

• Authors : Bill Bryson (Author)
• Publisher : Broadway Books; 1st Edition (September 14, 2004)
• Pages : 544 pages

2. Everything You Need to Ace World History in One Big Fat Notebook

The history of the world is a pertinent subject to every human. There are so many historical events that have shaped what the world is today. History is created every day. To better equip for the present and future, everyone should have a general knowledge of world history.  Everything You Need to Ace World History in One Big Fat Notebook  by Workman Publish is a great text for updating oneself on Earth’s historic events. There is great history in this book from a number of locations. This book includes many eras and locations: the middle ages across the world, the Paleolithic Era, colonialism, and more. While this is a great text for understanding world history, it is based on lots of science. It discusses the theory of evolution and does not take religion into account. All in all, it’s a wonderful book on world history, but some may be disappointed by the views of the author.

• Authors : Workman Publishing (Author), Michael Lindblad (Editor), Ximena Vengoechea (Contributor), Editors of Brain Quest (Draft Writer)
• Publisher : Workman Publishing Company; Illustrated Edition (August 9, 2016)
• Pages : 528 pages

3. Salt: A World History

History is such an interesting and intriguing subject because there is so much of it. Every item, person, and animal has a history behind them.  Salt: A World History  by Mark Kurlansky analyzes the history behind a product that is used all over the world: salt. When sprinkling salt on french fries or eggs in the morning, few take the time to think about its history and where it came from. This book is a unique and fun take on history. Kurlansky sheds light on the only edible rock in the world. There are a lot of great details about salt in this book. Who knew salt could be such an interesting topic… but it is! This is an exciting history book that will engage and entertain readers.

• Authors : Mark Kurlansky (Author)
• Publisher : Penguin Books (January 28, 2003)
• Pages : 496 pages

4. History of the World Part I

The history of the world is extensive. There have been so many historical events, but important and incidental. When learning the history of the world, it can be difficult to determine what to learn.  History of the World Part I  starring Mel Brooks is a movie that entertains viewers while educating them on the history of the world. Brooks is a hilarious actor that makes every movie he stars in engaging and funny. The movie is called  History of the World Part 1 , but it doesn’t actually have a part 2. The second movie was never released, which makes the title even funnier. All in all, this is a funny movie about history, but it’s not great for learning. This is mindless entertainment for someone who needs a mood boost.

• Authors : Mel Brooks (Actor)

5. A History of the World in Glasses

Most everyone enjoys a drink now and then. The universe language of beer and alcohol is known far and wide. Drinking can make anything fun– even history can be a fun drinking topic.  A History of the World in Glasses  by Tom Standage compares six eras of world history to six different drinks. The six drinks are: beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and coca-cola. The eras in this book range from the stone age to the 21st century. Standage has a modern approach to this book. Everyone has their drink of choice, which can then be associated with an era of choice. Readers will be intrigued by the comparisons Standage makes, and want to read more based on said comparisons. This is quite the engaging read. World history has never been discussed in quite this way. This text is fun, entertaining, and easy to read!

• Authors : Tom Standage (Author)
• Publisher : Walker Publishing Company (May 16, 2006)
• Pages : 336 pages

6. A Little History of the World

History is a subject that begins being taught at an elementary level. There are so many events to discuss, and not enough schooling to discuss them. A Little History of the World by E.H. Gombrich is a great text for young readers. Children and teens alike can read this book to learn history in a fun, exciting way. Gombrich writes this book as a long story about mankind. This book is based on facts and research, but it is not told as such. Readers will enjoy this book as an adventure, instead of as a boring history lesson. In addition to being told like a story, this book also has grand and colorful pictures. The book discusses these historical events, but they are not heavily dissected. This is a great book for gaining a basic understanding of world history. That’s why it is perfect for children and teens.

• Authors : E. H. Gombrich (Author), Clifford Harper (Illustrator)
• Publisher : Yale University Press; 7/20/08 Edition (October 7, 2008)
• Pages : 284 pages

7. A History of the World in 100 Objects

“Things” are what seem to make up the world. There seems to be a shop for everything: candles, perfume, clothing, phones, and more. People really seem to enjoy their things, too. So why not use those products to explain history?  A History of the World in 100 Objects  by Neil MacGregor uses a refreshing approach to tackle important topics in world history. Macgregor discusses world history through specific objects. This book’s focus is on the objects of history. By looking at these objects, readers can see how quickly and efficiently mankind has evolved. There are many cultures, eras, and objects discussed in this book. There is truly something for everyone. The text is intriguing, and never boring. Readers will enjoy reading about history in a unique and engaging way.

• Authors : Neil MacGregor (Author)
• Publisher : Penguin Books; Illustrated Edition (September 24, 2013)
• Pages : 736 pages

8. History of the World Map by Map

Even though world history is meant to discuss the history of the entire world, there are often countries whose histories overshadow others.  History of the World Map by Map  by DK documents history in a unique way– through the images of maps. There are maps used for many events in this book, like: World War II, the Industrial Revolution, the Atlantic Slave Trade. These are major world events that happened in many different countries. DK uses maps to drive home their research and points made on these historical events. The maps in this book are vivid and defined. The beauty of these images alone will attract readers to learn about these events. History, although interesting, can be a boring subject. By attaching real-life maps and explaining the events that coincide with them, DK turns world history into an exciting subject that many will want to read about.

• Authors : DK (Author), Smithsonian Institution (Contributor)
• Publisher : DK; Illustrated Edition (October 23, 2018)
• Pages : 440 pages

9. A History of the World

There are so many forms of media: movies, tv shows, podcasts, books, magazines, and more. Different forms of media can educate viewers in different ways, so why not combine some of them?  A History of the World  by Andrew Marr is a book, an audiobook, and a television series. A different topic, time period, or person is addressed in every episode of the television series. These episodes then coincide with sections of the book. This is the ultimate way to read about history. The book covers many topics of world history. The sections done go too into depth on these topics, but that is what the television series is for. The book isn’t too long either. It’s the appropriate length so as to not get bored, but also stay engaged and learn lots.

• Authors : Andrew Marr (Author)
• Publisher : Pan Macmillan; Unabridged edition (November 5, 2012)
• Pages : 500 pages

10. A Short History of the World

A Short HIstory of the World  by Christopher Lascelles is a book that aims to fill the big gaps in history. There are many different ages and eras analyzed in this book. The first topic discussed is the Big Bang. There are differing theories and opinions on the Big Bang that are greatly debated. The book, however, still discusses this theory and works through all important historical events. The history in this book is documented up to 2014, when the book was published. Events from the 2000’s are still history, and should be treated as such. This book has a wide array of information that will help many readers understand world history.

• Authors : Christopher Lascelles (Author)
• Publisher : Crux Publishing Ltd (January 15, 2014)
• Pages : 276 pages

11. The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome

The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome  by Susan Wise Bauer is an engaging audiobook that discusses the Ancient World. World history is a broad topic because there is so much of it. By narrowing world history down to one era, Bauer can discuss topics with more depth and passion. Creating a world history audiobook is risky. One would expect that an audiobook would simply sound like a lecture. Bauer, however, makes it interesting. Hearing the passion in her voice gets listeners excited about the subject. The audiobook is fun, but it also has negative components. Religion is discussed a little too openly in this book, especially for a world history book. World history should be based on facts, not opinion. This book is still a great listen, though.

• Authors : Susan Wise Bauer (Author)
• Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company; Illustrated Edition (March 17, 2007)
• Pages : 896 pages

12. History: From the Dawn of Civilization to the Present Day

The Smithsonian is one of the most famous history museums in the world. They have a wide selection of historical artifacts that are accompanied with their own description. About 29 million people visit the Smithsonian a year, but not everyone can make a trip to DC.  History: From the Dawn of Civilization to the Present Day  by Smithsonian Institute is the Smithsonian’s very own history book. Those who wish to visit the Smithsonian but can’t make the trip will enjoy this read. The book includes beautiful images to accompany the text. Something of the images included can actually be found in the Smithsonian today. The best part of this book, however, is that it discusses history, as well as contemporary culture. The book discusses the Battle of Hastings, but it also discusses climate change and social media. The Smithsonian Institute provides a great scope of the world, both past and present, in this book.

• Authors : Adam Hart-Davis (Author)
• Publisher : DK ADULT (March 19, 2012)
• Pages : 612 pages

13. The Penguin History of the World

Penguins are arguably one of the cutest forms of birds. They are cute, interesting, and intelligent little animals. They also are not at all associated with world history, but they do make for a catchy title. The Penguin History of the World by J.M. Roberts is not to be mistaken for a book about penguins. This book actually discusses the history of humankind. This book is actually on its sixth edition. The first edition was published in 1976. Roberts was the initial author, but passed away in 2003. The sixth edition of the book has been revised by Arne Westad. The book discusses a number of huge events in the world’s history. The book is a long read, but full of great information. That being said, it can get boring and arduous. However, this is a wonderful text for teaching world history classes because there are so many topics discussed, and it is constantly being updated.

• Authors : J. M. Roberts (Author), Odd Arne Westad (Editor)
• Publisher : Penguin Books; 6th ed. Edition (September 30, 2014)
• Pages : 1280 pages

14. A Little History of the World: Illustrated Edition

A Little History of the World  by E.H. Gombrich is a popular, well-reviewed history book. The illustrated edition of this book is just the same. Those who love both history and art will be fascinated with this book. The history lessons are still there, but they are accompanied by beautiful illustrations and pictures. There are many different kinds of illustrations in this book: emblems, symbols, motifs, line drawings, and more. There are beautiful maps, fine paper, and classic designs. The beauty of this book is what draws people in, but the content is what keeps people interested and engaged. This is a wonderful read for people of all ages, and with all backgrounds of history knowledge.

• Authors : E. H. Gombrich (Author)
• Publisher : Yale University Press; Illustrated Edition (October 22, 2013)
• Pages : 364 pages

15. World History for Dummies

When learning about history, it’s easy to think “I’m never going to remember this! Why am I even learning it?” With all the information in the world, it’s easy to think “why bother?”. But no one should give up.  World History for Dummies  by Peter Haugen explains history in a way that even the “dumbest” person can understand. This language in this book isn’t overly difficult to understand. The topics aren’t confusing or beyond rationalization. This book was made for people who don’t like history and aren’t very good at it. Historians aren’t going to sit down and read this book because it wasn’t made for them. Those who are struggling in a world history class, or simply don’t understand world history, should check out this book. The text is both informative and easy to understand.

• Authors : Peter Haugen (Author)
• Publisher : For Dummies; 2nd Edition (June 2, 2009)
• Pages : 408 pages

16. World History: From the Ancient World to the Information Age

World History: From the Ancient World to the Information Age  by Phillip Parker takes a look at 350 of the world’s most valuable events. In this book, Parker discusses turning points in history, like: the creation of important inventions, the discovery of important theories, technological advances, and more. This book covers a wide range of years and places. And it does so in a readable way. There are fun facts included in this book, as well as colorful pictures. This is a wonderful read for history buffs, but it’s also great for those currently taking a history class. The information in this book is easy to learn. Students in world history classes will be ahead of schedule. Most anyone can read this book and gain a better understanding of world history.

• Authors : Philip Parker (Author)
• Publisher : DK; Slp Edition (October 3, 2017)
• Pages : 416 pages

17. Advanced Placement World History: Modern

Students of all ages need a reliable textbook when studying world history.  Advanced Placement World History  by Perfection Learning covers many AP world history topics. Young teens and high school students will thoroughly enjoy this book. The information in it is straight to the point and interesting. The language is easy to read, but not so easy that students won’t be challenged. Educators will be able to identify key units and concepts in this book for classes. And students who are taking AP World History but are not assigned this book can read it, too. This edition of the book was updated in 2020, so everything is accurate and appropriate for readers. This is a modern textbook with lots of great information.

• Authors : Editors (Author)
• Publisher : Perfection Learning (September 1, 2019)

18. Patterns of World History: Volume One

Patterns of World History: Volume One  by Peter Von Sivers, Charles A. Desnoyers, and George B. Stow is a book full of history patterns that have repeated themselves. By studying the origins of various origins, interactions, and adaptations of the past, the authors discover patterns that have occurred in history. The common phrase, “History Repeats Itself,” doesn’t lie. However, each historical pattern has the opportunity to stop. The pattern must simply be identified, and then society can try and stop it. This is a wonderful book that helps people understand the historical patterns of the world, and how they are affecting the present.

• Authors : Peter Von Sivers (Author), Charles A. Desnoyers (Author), George B. Stow (Author)
• Publisher : Oxford University Press; 3rd Edition (September 1, 2017)
• Pages : 792 pages

19. World History in Documents: A Comparative Reader

World History in Documents: A Comparative Reader  by Peter N. Stearns is a book that teaches history through documents. There have been many historical documents in history that made a huge impact on society today. This is a wonderful book for college level history courses, or AP history courses in high school. Students will be able to accurately analyze the text of some of the world’s most important documents. This book is on its second edition. The first edition was released in 2003, and this edition was published in 2008. The documents in this book are great for survey classes. There are many interesting texts included in this book.

• Authors : Peter N. Stearns (Author)
• Publisher : NYU Press; 2nd Edition (April 15, 2008)
• Pages : 640 pages

20. Inquiry-Based Lessons in World History: Early Humans to Global Expansion

History has many lessons. Some lessons simply acknowledge what happened and moving forward. Other lessons are there to teach the world to learn from their mistakes and not repeat them. This is the first volume in this book series, so it only covers a specific time period: 15,000 BCE to 1500 CE. There are many lesson plans included in this book. Teachers will appreciate the lessons in this book. These lessons are clear-cut, to the point, and great for high school students. There are thought-provoking lessons, plenty of resources, and great tasks for students. This is a fun history book that will really help teachers engage their students.

• Authors : Jana Kirchner (Author), Andrew McMichael (Author)
• Publisher : Prufrock Press (May 15, 2019)
• Pages : 200 pages

Choosing the Best World History Books

These world history books don’t begin to cover the many historical events of the world, but they are a start. They are great reads that will help the world understand its history. Reading these books is the ultimate history lesson. By reading and engaging with these books, readers can find the parts of history they most like, and then learn more about it.

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46 Books that Changed the World

By april snellings , mentalfloss .com | jun 14, 2023, 9:04 am edt.

Anyone who’s ever turned a page understands the potential for books to change the world in ways both large and small. Here, in no particular order, are just a few of history’s most influential tomes—and how they made humanity look at things in a new light.

1. Diamond Sutra

If we’re going to name influential books, we might as well begin with the oldest dated printed tome . On May 11, 868 CE —nearly 600 years before Gutenberg ever considered printing a Bible—a man named Wang Jie commissioned the printing of The Diamond Sutra , a Mahāyāna Buddhist “wisdom” text presented as a conversation between Buddha and his disciple, Subhuti, in Chinese. According to Susan Whitfield, then-director of the International Dunhuang Project at the British Library, “Printing was developed in China by the 8th century, and certainly by the 9th century, when this sutra was made, it was a refined art.” The 6000-word, nearly 16.5-foot-long scroll was found in 1900 in a secret library along the Silk Road in China; it was later taken to England by archaeologist Marc Aurel Stein. It now resides at the British Library, which calls it “one of the most influential Mahāyāna scriptures in East Asia.”

Wang Jie commissioned the book, according to Whitfield, because of one of Buddhism’s most important tenets: To do good deeds. “One of the ways of doing a good deed and gaining merit, and also sending out merit into the world for others, is by either copying an image of the Buddha, or by copying his words and transmitting them,” she explained in a 2007 talk. By unrolling the Sutra to read it, Wang Jie (or whoever possessed the Sutra ) would further spread Buddha’s teachings. “The Buddhists were one of the major groups that propagated and refined and developed printing,” Whitfield says, “because of the reason that they could realize multiple copies of prayers and other texts and that would be good for their religion.” —Erin McCarthy

2. Shakespeare’s First Folio

From shaping our ideas about what it means to be a teenager to inventing the modern name Jessica , William Shakespeare has shaped modern life in ways both subtle and dramatic. But without the First Folio, many of his most historically and culturally important works—including Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew, Julius Caesar , and The Tempest —probably would not have survived.

First published in 1623 as Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies , the First Folio collected 36 of Shakespeare’s plays, half of which had never appeared in print. (During Shakespeare’s life, actors who performed his plays didn’t work from scripts; they were given lengthy parchments containing only the lines they needed to learn.) Of the plays that had been previously published, most existed only as fragile “quartos.” The First Folio was compiled and published by Shakespeare’s friends and colleagues and is almost universally considered the most accurate historical source for his work—and often hailed as the single most important book of literature ever produced. In October 2020, a copy sold to a private collector for nearly $10 million—the highest recorded price ever paid at auction for a literary work.

But the First Folio didn’t just preserve the Bard’s plays; Shakespeare scholars maintain that it was critical in securing his reputation as an important playwright in the years following the English Civil War. Thanks in part to the First Folio, Shakespeare’s plays were widely available when English theaters were desperate for material. As a result, his work popularized dramatic conventions, plots, and linguistic devices that would profoundly influence everything from Western literature to Bollywood cinema . —April Snellings

3. Aesop’s Fables

The universal themes at the heart of Aesop's Fables have resonated with readers for millennia. The simple stories use anthropomorphized animals to convey moral messages—like “slow and steady wins the race” (“The Tortoise and the Hare”) and “revenge is a double-edged sword” (“The Farmer and the Fox”). Even if you didn’t read the story collection growing up, you’ve likely heard some of the many expressions it popularized. Supposedly written in the 6th century BCE by an enslaved man who may or may not have existed , Aesop’s Fables is one of the older works on this list, but its lasting influence on our stories, language, and morality is unmatched. —Michele Debczak

4. Republic

“If any books change the world, Republic has a good claim to first place,” wrote Simon Blackburn in his 2006 book Plato’s Republic: A Biography . Republic introduces many of Plato’s most iconic ideas, including his thoughts on a perfect society, his ruminations on the definition and importance of justice, and the Allegory of the Cave; Blackburn points out that there are studies analyzing the influence of Plato on, well, almost every other book on this list. In 2001, it was voted the single greatest work of philosophy ever composed. That’s not to say everyone agrees with Plato’s conclusions; Philosophers’ Magazine editor Julian Baggini called Republic “wrong on almost every point” but still allowed that “without it we might not have philosophy as we know it.”

Written sometime around 375 BCE, Republic is structured as a lengthy dialogue between Socrates and several other Athenian men (including Plato’s brothers). The conversation covers a lot of ground, ranging from the role of women in society (they’re just as qualified as men to be rulers and soldiers) to what kind of music upper-class children should listen to (definitely not the aulos ). But it’s primarily concerned with defining justice in both societal and personal terms, and proving that a just life is better and more satisfying than an unjust one. To make his point, Plato imagines an ideal state populated by three social classes: one that rules the state, one that guards it, and one that produces all the things the state needs.

Besides being the first major work of Western political philosophy and a foundational text of Western thought, Republic has been embraced by a wide range of influential figures throughout history. Martin Luther King Jr. named it as the one book (excluding the Bible, which the interviewer ruled out in the question) he’d want with him if he were stranded on a desert island [ PDF ]. “There is not a creative idea extant that is not discussed, in some way, in this work,” King said of Republic in a 1965 interview. On the other end of the spectrum, Mussolini was said to have always had a copy nearby, and The New York Times speculated that Republic might have influenced the Ayatollah Khomeini’s consequential reshaping of Iran. —AS

5. All Quiet on the Western Front

There had never been a war like World War I , and there had never been a novel like All Quiet on the Western Front .

The widespread use of trench warfare combined with devastating new weapons produced the bloodiest and deadliest fighting Europe had ever seen. The war claimed the lives of at least 9 million soldiers as well as millions of civilians; millions more were maimed by tanks, chemical weapons, and other new military technologies .

A decade after the war ended, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front became an instant sensation , racking up 1 million sales within a year in his native Germany and 800,000 more in Britain, France, and America combined. It wasn’t the first anti-war novel published, but it was the first to become an international bestseller, giving millions of readers a bleak and vivid account of modern warfare devoid of patriotic or jingoistic veneers.  

But Remarque’s novel—about a group of idealistic teenage boys who volunteer to fight for Germany toward the end of World War I, only to run headlong into the horrors and deprivations of war—would soon attract a very different sort of attention. All Quiet on the Western Front was published as the Nazis were coming to power, and they quickly set their sights on it, deeming it “a literary betrayal of the soldiers of the World War.” When Universal’s film adaptation opened in Germany in December 1930, a group of Nazis led by none other than Joseph Goebbels—Hitler’s future Minister of Propaganda—shut down a Berlin screening, setting off stink bombs, releasing mice, and viciously attacking audience members they thought were Jewish. In Vienna, thousands of Nazis attempted to storm a theater where the film was being shown. Hitler would later make it a crime to own the book, demanding that all copies be turned over for destruction.

Remarque himself managed to escape Germany with his life, but his younger sister wasn’t so fortunate: Elfriede Scholz was arrested and tried before ultimately being beheaded in December 1943. The judge presiding over her trial supposedly insisted she must “suffer for [her] brother.” —AS

6. Species Plantarum

Before Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus published his then-definitive plant guide Species Plantarum in 1753, there was no formal system in place for naming plants and animals—which was a problem, considering how many species had been introduced to Western science in the preceding few centuries. Most researchers used a polynomial system in which each organism was given a sometimes-lengthy descriptive name. Besides being unwieldy, polynomial names had no standardized format and were often highly subjective, so one species might have been known by several different names. People went around giving organisms names like Solanum caule inermi herbaceo , foliis pinnatis incises (“solanum with the smooth stem which is herbaceous and has incised pinnate leaves,” if your Latin is rusty) and hoping someone would know they were talking about a tomato.

With Species Plantarum , Linnaeus showed the world an alternative: binomial nomenclature, which assigned each of the 6000 plants listed in the book a two-word name identifying it by genus and species (the tomato, for example, was dubbed Solanum lycopersicum ). Binomial nomenclature was quickly adopted throughout the scientific community; more than 250 years later, we’re still using it. Along with Linnaeus’s other pivotal work, Systema Naturae , Species Plantarum provided the foundation for scientific classification, forever establishing Linnaeus as the “the Father of Taxonomy.” —AS

7. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is generally recognized as the first widely distributed feminist text. The ideas posited by Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792—that women possessed the same mental capacities and rational abilities as men, and therefore deserved the same rights—were downright revolutionary in late 18th-century England, where a married woman was often considered merely an extension of her husband. In her visionary (and often withering) polemic, Wollstonecraft argued that girls should be educated along with boys in a national, co-ed school system; that women should be paid the same as men; and that voting rights should be extended to women.

Vindication didn’t make many waves when it was first published . Most contemporary critics were either amenable to or casually dismissive of Wollstonecraft’s ideas. When it came to creating change, her explosive treatise had a long fuse. Across the Atlantic, Vindication helped inspire Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott to organize the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention , often viewed as the starting point of first wave feminism in the United States. Susan B. Anthony , who kept a portrait of Wollstonecraft hanging on her wall, identified herself as “a great admirer of this earliest work for woman’s right to Equality of rights” and serialized Vindication in her weekly feminist newspaper, The Revolution . —AS

8. The Origin of Continents and Oceans 

In 1910, German polymath Alfred Wegener’s friend got an atlas for a Christmas present. While looking through it, Wegener—like many before and since—was struck by the match between the coasts of South America and Africa, especially when comparing the continental shelves. He put the thought to the side—until the next year, when he came across a paper detailing a paleontological connection between the two. At the time, other scientists explained this away by theorizing that the continents were once connected by land bridges that had since sunk to the ocean floor. Wegener wasn’t satisfied with this theory, and in his 1915 book The Origins of Continents and Oceans , he posited a bold new idea: The continents as we know them today had once been part of a supercontinent he later dubbed “Pangaea.”

Over millennia, Wegener speculated, this ur-continent had broken up into successively smaller chunks until we were left with the seven continents we recognize today. Wegener’s ideas about why and how this happened, though, were less than convincing: He suggested they were either flung apart (albeit slowly) by the Earth’s rotation or scooted around by tidal forces. Either way, he was pretty sure they just plowed through the planet’s crust until they got to wherever they were going. The scientific community was not convinced, and Wegener was widely ridiculed.

Over time, things changed. By the 1960s, Wegener’s controversial theory of continental drift had evolved into plate tectonics, which the University of California Museum of Paleontology describes as “one of the most important and far-ranging geological theories of all time.” The scientific revolution set in motion by Wegener’s controversial book has dramatically changed our understanding of the planet, with far-reaching implications for geology, climate science, evolution, and other fields. —AS

9. Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes’s 1605 tale of a misguided idealist who fashions himself as a knight-errant satirized one kind of literature (chivalric romances) as successfully as it birthed a new one: the modern novel . Many of its story mechanics—the concept of the unreliable narrator chief among them—are still standard in today’s fiction, and 20th-century literary critic Lionel Trilling once commented that “it can be said that all prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote .”

But Cervantes’s impact isn’t confined to literary spheres. “Every generation of intellectuals has seen its own preoccupations and its own most cherished discoveries anticipated in Cervantes’s text,” Cervantes expert Carroll B. Johnson said in a 2006 lecture [ PDF ]. “The rationalists of the 18th century discovered that Cervantes had anticipated them by writing the epic of good sense and social integration. The romantics of the next century discovered the opposite, that Cervantes had anticipated their own preoccupation with the tragic situation of the eccentric genius in a hostile society.” The list goes on, right up to our modern-day musings on the nature of reality: “Cervantes had discovered, or intuited, that reality is never a given, just out there, existing independently of us, but is always constructed by humans through socio-linguistic practice.” —Ellen Gutoskey

10. Giovanni’s Room

The early to mid-20th century was no place for frank discussions about being gay, which makes James Baldwin ’s Giovanni’s Room all the more remarkable. The 1956 novel explores the same-sex relations of numerous characters inhabiting post-World War II Paris. Its lead character, David, is preparing for marriage to his girlfriend, Hella, when he meets an Italian bartender named Giovanni. Their affair is complicated by legal troubles that threaten Giovanni’s very existence. David’s introspection toward his true sexual identity was uncommon for literature of the era: Baldwin brought it to the surface, using a literary reputation burnished by his first novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain , as currency for a controversial subject. Baldwin explained that it wasn’t an autobiography, but “more a study of what might have been or what I feel might have been.”

That the book lent its gay character compassion wasn’t as troubling to some as the fact that Baldwin, a Black man, chose to write about a white cast of characters: The writer later said he “could not handle both propositions” of race and sexuality in the same book at that point in his life. However Baldwin needed to approach it, Giovanni’s Room stands as a courageous work—one that provided welcome company to readers waiting on a society to accept them. In Baldwin’s work, they were seen. —Jake Rossen

11. Common Sense

In January 1776, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense , a 47-page pamphlet that galvanized American colonists to break from Great Britain by systematically laying out all the reasons why they should, was published. Not only was Britain doing a bad job serving its North American holdings, Paine explained, but monarchy was an inherently flawed system of government to begin with, and the colonists had a golden opportunity to build a completely new one run by and for the people.

Paine’s arguments struck such a strong, patriotic chord among the general public that the Founding Fathers realized the only way forward was to hurry up and declare independence. John Adams said of the work in March 1776, “all agree there is a great deal of good sense, delivered in a clear, simple, concise and nervous Style.” (Though he wasn’t all positive—Adams was highly critical of Paine’s plan for the new government and noted the author “has a better Hand at pulling down than building.”)

Just as Paine had hoped, the American Revolution resulted in a whole new kind of self-governing nation—one that would inspire similar self-governance around the world. And Paine’s influence wasn’t confined to the United States: From 1792 to 1802, he lived in France, where he did his best to help the country implement and fortify a republican government, too (though admittedly that process was way more turbulent ). —EG

12. The Prince

Niccolò Machiavelli’s early 16th-century treatise on how to get and keep power is often boiled down to a couple key platitudes: the end justifies the means and it’s better to be feared than loved , neither of which appear in such stark terms in the book itself.

What Machiavelli does say about the former is that since people “are always taken by what a thing seems to be and by what comes of it,” a leader can operate knowing that whatever means he employs to “[conquer] and [hold] his state … will always be considered honest.” Regarding love and fear, Machiavelli expresses that because it’s tough for a ruler to be feared and loved, “it is much safer to be feared than loved, if one of the two must be lacking.”

Both instances reveal the underlying pragmatism present throughout The Prince , which sharply contrasted the idealism of many other political theorists of the era. In this way, Machiavelli essentially introduced a whole new lens through which to view politics.

“Machiavelli is famous, or infamous, for shifting the sense of ‘virtue’ from moral worth to effectiveness. The virtuous figures of The Prince are those who do whatever it takes to seize and maintain foreign territory, even if it entails the grossest violations. This is a morality, if that’s the right word, of ends,” Boston University history professor James Johnson said in a 2013 interview .

Robert P. Harrison , professor of Italian literature at Stanford University, put it even more simply back in 2009: “Machiavelli was the first theorist to decisively divorce politics from ethics.” —EG

13. Silent Spring

“There was a strange stillness,” Rachel Carson wrote. “It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and the woods and marsh.”

In Silent Spring , Carson described the environmental harms of man-made pesticides with lyrical words and visceral truths. She exposed the destructive power of agricultural chemicals, which killed pollinating insects, polluted rivers and soil, and caused cancer in humans. Readers, including President John F. Kennedy, pushed for stronger environmental laws. “In the ‘60s, we were only just waking up to the power that we had to damage the natural world,” Jonathon Porritt, former director of Friends of the Earth, told The Guardian in 2012. “Rachel Carson was the first to give voice to that concern in way that came through loud and clear to society.” Directly or indirectly, the impact of Silent Spring can be seen in the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency, passage of the Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Act, and the modern environmental movement. —Kat Long  

14. The Art of War

Could a book about tactical warfare from around the 5th century BCE be relevant today? Without doubt. Author Sun Tzu’s 13-chapter treatise on combat strategy has had an application in everything from corporate battles to sports to politics to actual war. (It’s also, strangely, not very much of a warmongering tale: Tzu advocates for diplomacy whenever possible.)

More philosophical than instructional, The Art of War has influenced millions by its concise wisdom . “He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks” could apply to a military general or a sales team leader. But Tzu himself may not have been the sole author or even a real person. Not that it’s ever mattered to readers. Warfare is, after all, “the art of deception.” —JR

15. The Feminine Mystique

Published in 1963, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique challenged the popular notion that being a housewife and mother was a woman’s only path to fulfillment. Its radical message resonated with readers, and in its first three years of publication the nonfiction book sold nearly 3 million copies .

Many scholars credit Friedan for launching the second wave of feminism in the 1960s (which is not to say the book doesn’t have issues: It centers on the white, middle class woman and mostly ignores issues faced by Black and LGBTQ+ women). According to the National Women’s History Museum, The Feminine Mystique “gave voice to millions of American women’s frustrations with their limited gender roles and helped spark widespread public activism for gender equality.” —MD

16. Unsafe at Any Speed

For the first part of the 20th century, automobiles were viewed as an engineering marvel—but not necessarily a safe one. Accidents were common, and thanks to a lack of mandatory safety laws, features like seatbelts were typically ignored to trim costs. That all changed with Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile , lawyer and consumer advocate Ralph Nader’s 1965 polemic on the callous nature of the auto industry. Inspired in part by Rachel Carson ’s Silent Spring and its influential environmental message, Nader set out to do the same for the car world, describing automotive designs that ignored passenger safety.

The response was immediate: Less than a year after the book was published, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, establishing federal oversight that made sure automakers were adhering to new safety standards; state-mandated seat belt laws expanded . According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, seat belts saved 374,000 lives from 1975 to 2017.

Even those who had the most to lose from Nader’s crusade were impressed. “The book had a seminal effect,” auto executive Robert A. Lutz told The New York Times in 2015. “I don’t like Ralph Nader and I didn’t like the book, but there was definitely a role for government in automotive safety.” —JR

17. The Kinsey Reports

Alfred Kinsey’s 1948 book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male , and its 1953 companion, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female , weren’t flawless reference texts on the subject of sexual habits. His data came from interviews with people—5300 men and nearly 6000 women—who weren’t even close to representing the American population as a whole: They were all white, for one thing, and there were outsized proportions of certain demographics, such as college students and incarcerated men.

But both books, together known as the Kinsey Reports , did become bestsellers , spotlighting an appetite for more transparency when it came to sex. This helped lay the groundwork for the sexual revolution and paved the way for decades of further study into sex and gender. Kinsey’s researched also reinforced the idea that “exclusively heterosexual” and “exclusively homosexual,” in his terms, were just two points on a much more expansive spectrum; his “ Kinsey Scale ” accounted for people whose sexual experiences were “equally heterosexual and homosexual,” “predominantly homosexual, only incidentally heterosexual,” and more. Our modern-day understanding of sexuality is significantly more nuanced, but the Kinsey Scale was an influential jumping-off point. —EG

“It is a fantasy of the political future, and, like any such fantasy, serves its author as a magnifying device for an examination of the present,” wrote The New Yorker upon the 1949 publication of 1984 . That review could have been written yesterday. Though hardly a horror tale, Orwell’s novel—about writer Winston Smith, duty-bound to shift the truth to suit the domineering state—has long been a touchstone for warnings of dystopian futures.

The phrases big brother , doublethink , and newspeak all sprung from Orwell, who was seriously ill with tuberculosis while writing the book. (He died just months after it was published.) The story has become shorthand for gluttonous authority and elastic truth—or, in a word, Orwellian. —JR

19. Native Son

“The day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever,” wrote literary critic Irving Howe in a 1963 essay for Dissent magazine. “Richard Wright’s novel brought out into the open, as no one ever had before, the hatred, fear, and violence that have crippled and may yet destroy our culture.”

More than 80 years after the 1940 publication of Native Son , Howe’s comments still ring true. Wright’s first published novel, about a young Black man who accidentally kills the daughter of his wealthy white employer, was one of the first mainstream books to explore the personal and societal damage that systemic racism inflicts. It quickly rooted itself in America’s collective conscience, selling more than 200,000 copies in its first three weeks of publication and becoming the first novel by a Black writer to be selected by the influential Book of the Month Club. In 1971, Ralph Ellison called it “one of the major literary events in the history of American literature. And I can say this even though at this point I have certain reservations concerning its view of reality.”

Native Son was and remains a difficult book to read. The crimes committed by Wright’s protagonist, 20-year-old Bigger Thomas, are horrific and depicted in harrowing detail. But it isn’t sadism that initially drives him to acts of heinous violence; it’s a fear and hate of white people so intense it threatens to erase his humanity. But Wright wasn’t just condemning the Jim Crow South and its culture of fear and violence he’d fled in 1927; Native Son argued that even well-meaning white people benefitted from a fundamentally racist society and participated, whether they knew it or not, in the brutal oppression of Black people. For countless readers, Native Son marked the first time they’d been forced to consider the true, wide-reaching consequences of that oppression. —AS

20. Gray’s Anatomy

A reference book published in 1858 isn’t necessarily the kind of source you’d think would stand the test of time, but this illustrated guide to human anatomy is still considered “The Doctor’s Bible.” Surgeons Henry Gray and Henry Vandyke Carter’s collaboration was fairly short-lived—it took just three years for them to create the original text and woodcut images of a person’s insides—but formed the basis of an essential piece of any medical student’s education. More than 150 years later, Gray’s Anatomy has been in continuous publication ever since; it’s currently in its 42nd edition. —Jennifer Marie Wood

21. On the Origin of Species

On the Origin of Species is often called the greatest science book of all time. It introduced Charles Darwin ’s theory of evolution by natural selection to a wide audience, backed up by evidence he collected on his voyage to the Southern Hemisphere on the H.M.S. Beagle in the early 1830s and a further two decades of researching the scientific literature, experimentation, and consolidating evidence for his theory. Darwin wasn’t the only naturalist who had arrived at the idea that all life on Earth descended from earlier ancestors according to their fitness for survival; Alfred Russel Wallace spent years in Amazonia and Southeast Asia studying the local flora and fauna and came up with a similar idea. A letter from Wallace spurred Darwin to complete his work, and it was Darwin who became famous for the theory of natural selection—and bore the brunt of the fallout.

The book offended both religious and scientific minds. Prior to Darwin’s theory, many people believed the world was organized according to “natural theology,” a system in which species’ characteristics, designed by a benevolent Creator, were immutable. Religious leaders pushed back on the idea that humans could have evolved from animals rather than being created by God in his image. Some prominent scientists, like astronomer John F.W. Herschel and paleontologist Richard Owen , disputed parts or all of Darwin’s conclusions. Darwin did have his supporters, though, including physicist Thomas Huxley (who vigorously defended the work) and geologist Charles Lyell.

As time went on, Darwin’s theories were tested, and they held up to scrutiny. The public largely came to accept his evidence and conclusions. With natural selection, On the Origin of Species explained the mechanism responsible for species’ adaptation, providing the foundation for the modern field of evolutionary biology in an elegantly written form. As the Princeton University geneticist Lee J. Silver told Discover , “Darwin revolutionized our understanding of life.” —KL

22. The Jungle

A more nauseating , change-demanding novel could hardly have been imagined in the first decade of the 20th century—and that was the point of The Jungle . Upton Sinclair, a journalist and ardent socialist, wanted to expose the dangerous conditions, economic exploitation of workers, animal cruelty, and corporate monopolies in Chicago’s meatpacking industry. The Jungle humanized these offenses in the struggles of its protagonist, a Lithuanian immigrant, to make an honest and fair living in America. It was an instant bestseller. The book also bolstered support for progressive food safety laws such as the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, aimed at protecting consumers from adulterated or harmful products. Sinclair regretted that the novel did not have the same impact on improving labor conditions, however. “I aimed at the public’s heart,” he once wrote , “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” —KL

Whether you call it a historical novel, semi-autobiography, or, in the word of its author Alex Haley, “ faction ,” his 1976 book Roots: The Saga of an American Family sparked widespread interest in African American history and genealogy. The story follows a Gambian boy, Kunta Kinte, who is kidnapped in the 1760s and brought to America, where he and his descendants suffer generations of enslavement.

Haley suggested that Roots was the story of his own family and ancestry, though some scholars argued with the veracity of his claim. Nevertheless, the hit book was turned into an eight-part TV miniseries in 1977 that made an even bigger splash , with more than 130 million people tuning in . Roots prompted Americans to look back on their own stories with a clearer lens. —KL

24. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl

Young adults around the world have pored over the pages of Anne Frank’s diary , an intimate window into the life of a young teenager facing the horrors of the Holocaust that has sold more than 30 million copies in nearly 70 languages since it was published in 1947 . It can be hard to picture the terrible day-to-day experiences of life during such a terrible time; Anne’s diary, written over the course of two years that she and her family spent in hiding in the Secret Annex, makes that era of history feel undeniably vivid and real. On August 1, 1944, Anne wrote her last entry, and three days later, the family was discovered. Anne died of typhus at Germany’s Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. The only person from the Secret Annex to survive the Holocaust was Anne’s father, Otto, who would go on to publish her diary.

One of the most widely read nonfiction books in the world, The Diary of a Young Girl has inspired everyone from Nobel Peace Prize winner and activist Malala Yousafzai to Nelson Mandela. It’s incredibly important today —not just because many Holocaust survivors have passed away and are no longer able to tell their own stories, but because, in the words of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “ The Diary of Anne Frank is the first, and sometimes only, exposure many people have to the history of the Holocaust. … Anne has become a symbol for the lost promise of the more than 1 million Jewish children who died in the Holocaust.” —Kerry Wolfe

25. A Dictionary of the English Language

For eight years , Samuel Johnson and a handful of assistants crammed into the garret of 17 Gough Square in London. On cold days, they huffed warm breath onto their hands to heat their fingers as they worked, paging through books and noting how words were used. Their work was tedious, but it culminated in the 40,000-entry A Dictionary of the English Language .

Though Johnson is known as the “Father of the English Dictionary,” he wasn’t actually the first person to write a dictionary. But he did, as Lynda Mugglestone , a professor of the history of English at the University of Oxford, tells Mental Floss, “turn dictionary making on its head.”

Many previous lexicographers sought to preserve a language as it was. Their authors defined words and aimed to essentially freeze a language in time, without paying much regard to how the masses actually used the words contained within. Johnson, too, was approached to compile such a tome by a group of booksellers. “It's a very prescriptive model of a dictionary that he's in essence invited to write,” Mugglestone says. “But that's not the kind of dictionary he does write.”

Instead, Johnson created a more descriptive dictionary. “Johnson's method moved into much more what we might see as a democracy of words, going out and finding evidence,” Mugglestone says. He pored over a rich assortment of material, plucking words from everything from the works of Shakespeare to people’s personal letters to find evidence of how people used the language. He drew upon a mix of classic literature and everyday domestic sources, and even cited work by women writers in his research—a radical move at the time. (That said, according to one analysis , “of the 114,000-odd quotations in the Dictionary, fewer than thirty … are from female authors.”) Even today you can see evidence of his, well, evidence; some of the annotations he created while researching for the dictionary still exist within the books he read.

Johnson’s work is also incredibly nuanced. He does more than give a single definition for each word. “He provides an extraordinary wealth of labels whereby we can see, OK, not only does the word exist in English, but we can see which context, which meanings are used,” Mugglestone says. Johnson’s dictionary lists alternate spellings, and he notes which words are phasing out of or creeping into the English language.

A Dictionary of the English Language is packed with evidence and nuance. But it’s also surprisingly personal. Johnson sprinkles quotes and musing throughout the text, remarking upon the words themselves and the process he undertook to create the dictionary. “There’s a human story of someone in the really upper cold territories of a historic house, working with his assistants in this enormous space of time,” Mugglestone says. “There are very few dictionaries where we can get behind the print text to such an extent.”  —KW  

26. The Iliad

Homer’s the Iliad is, according to LaTrobe University professor Chris Mackie, typically regarded as “the first work of European literature.” The tale is epic—in every sense of the word. It’s believed the lengthy poem about a brief period within the Trojan War dates to between the 8th and 7th centuries BCE (6th century at a push). The Iliad captured elements passed down via a long tradition of oral history and helped shape Greek culture in the years that followed. It influenced ancient scholars and artists , and even, as the BBC notes , “changed the way people worshipped”: Homer’s saga described the Greek gods and introduced heroes that remain legendary today, thousands of years after the poem was penned. —KW

27. The Color Purple

A cultural marvel for Black female-led literature, The Color Purple won Alice Walker both the 1983 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and the 1983 National Book Award for hardcover fiction, making her the first Black woman to win either. The Color Purple detailed struggles with identity, independence, and oppression within the Black female experience—and it was challenged as unfit for schools as early as a year after its publication. In 1984, a California high school cited it as having “troubling ideas about race relations, man’s relationship to God, African history, and human sexuality.” While “troubling” is up to interpretation, the story undoubtedly sparked some controversial conversations about race, religion, gender, and sexual fluidity.

But what some deem controversial, others deem comforting: The Color Purple resonates with Black women in part due to its effort to break down the “ strong Black woman ” trope. The Black female characters in the book exemplify vulnerability and paint Black women in a soft light that many have historically tried to harshen. The stress Walker places on the importance of fostering relationships with other Black women in a setting with “us against the world” conflicts exemplifies the sense of community created within marginalized groups. —Bethel Afful

28. The Lord of the Rings

If you're a fan of Skyrim , Game of Thrones , or Dungeons and Dragons , thank J.R.R. Tolkien . The British author revolutionized the modern fantasy genre when The Lord of the Rings —his adult-oriented follow-up to the children’s book The Hobbit —became a global sensation.

From 1954 to 1955, the epic story (which Tolkien considered one work) was released in three installments: The Fellowship of the Ring , The Two Towers , and The Return of the King . Though it didn’t invent dwarves, elves, or wizards, the book launched a new movement.

According to John Garth , the author of The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien and Tolkien and the Great War , fantasy as a marketing label “didn’t exist” prior to Tolkien. “You would see books marketed as romance in the old sense of the word—not meaning a love story, but meaning an adventure in which improbable things happen,” he tells Mental Floss. “Fairytales had kind of died off with the First World War, and Tolkien set about rescuing the fairy story from that death knell. What he did was he took fairy stories and made them heroic, and used them to process his feelings about what was going on in the contemporary world—particularly the First World War.”

Publishing companies were hungry to recreate the success of The Lord of the Rings . New books labeled “high fantasy” flooded stores, and their influence began to bleed into other areas of pop culture. “This huge popularization of fantasy novel led in other strange directions, surprising directions,” Garth says. “Roleplaying games— Dungeons and Dragons in particular—are inspired by that fantasy genre as a whole, but obviously by Tolkien too. Then right on into computer gaming, so all the roleplaying games that people play now can be traced back to Tolkien’s impact on publishing—and arguably too, of course, the huge rise in science fiction and fantasy movies.”

The Lord of the Rings has been around for nearly 70 years, and the ubiquity of high fantasy adventures across mediums shows its influence is still strong today. —MD

29. The Interpretation of Dreams

Sigmund Freud’s 1899 book introduced some of his most famous concepts to the public. In it, he posited the existence of an independently functioning “unconscious mind” that expresses itself through dreams.

While Freud’s theories on the purpose and significance of dreams are met with scrutiny today , the influence of The Interpretation of Dreams is undeniable; many scholars credit it with laying the foundation for modern psychoanalysis and dream interpretation. —MD

30. The Communist Manifesto

“A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism.” So begins The Communist Manifesto , Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s 1848 exploration into the political theory of how major societal changes are often linked to historical class struggles.

Split into four sections, the pamphlet helped define the core tenets of communism as it existed in the mid-19th century and serves as a foundational text for what would later become known as Marxism . It also functions as a document of a revolutionary era, aligning the communist movement with the then-novel idea of democracy, which the Revolutions of 1848 (which occurred in Germany, France, and other parts of Europe) were predicated upon.

“It’s a document of a time when new possibilities [seemed] more and more realistic,” Drew Flanagan , Assistant Professor of History and Director of the History and Political Science program at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford, tells Mental Floss.

After falling into relative obscurity following the 1848 Revolutions, the Manifesto was reclaimed—and subsequently reinterpreted—by revolutionary political movements emerging around the world by the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including the Bolshevik party of Russia during the October Revolution of 1917 and the Communist Party of China during the Chinese Communist Revolution . “People decades later were the ones who really picked this up, not so much people in the mid-19th century,” Flanagan says.

Given the historical significance of those communist-led revolutions, it would be easy to trace the roots back to Marx and Engels and specifically to the Manifesto , which predates Das Kapital (1867), another influential work penned by Marx. But Flanagan notes that it’s important to look at the Manifesto through its historical context, and to separate the ideas Marx and Engels laid out in their work from how it was understood and used in subsequent centuries.

Still, for folks in the modern era, the Manifesto remains prescient given that many societal issues that Marx and Engels identified in it (like class-based inequality) are still ongoing, and because it offers—whether one fully believes in its ideology or not—a vision of a different kind of democracy. “One of the reasons why the Manifesto matters for [modern-day] activists, but also for others, is that it contains an encapsulation of Marxism,” Flanagan says. In that way, it serves as “a primer for activists, and therein, I think lies a lot of the key to its impact. [In] reading the Manifesto , I could imagine an activist feeling like this has a sort of moral clarity and directness that’s very appealing. And the general picture of a society that’s dominated by ownership and by a capitalist class is one that arguably is very relevant.” —Shayna Murphy

31. A People’s History of the United States

School textbooks are often construed as the objective truth, but reality is often far more complex. That was the point o f A People’s History of the United States , Howard Zinn’s 1980 tome on the events that shaped the country’s past as told from the view of the historically oppressed: women, immigrants, and underrepresented groups; vaunted figures like Lincoln and Roosevelt were portrayed with blemishes.

While not universally praised—sometimes criticized as “leftist propaganda,” it’s regularly made banned book lists, and some historians criticize it as just being bad history —Zinn’s work has led to renovated study curriculums and prompted generations of students to question the accepted narrative.  — JR 

32. The Second Sex

Although French writer and social theorist Simone de Beauvoir didn’t consider herself a philosopher, her groundbreaking 1949 work, Le Deuxième Sexe (translated as The Second Sex ) is regarded by many modern-day scholars as one of the most influential existentialist texts ever printed.

As an exploration into society’s treatment of women, de Beauvoir ’s book simultaneously sheds light on historical myths surrounding womanhood while also debunking commonly held misconceptions related to contemporary gender norms and sexuality (whole books have been written on the single sentence “ On ne naît pas femme: on le devient ”). Yet throughout, her work is imbued with the principles of existentialism—the belief that every individual, regardless of sex or gender, has the right to self-determination and should be able to “take on the individual responsibility that comes with freedom,” according to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

The book was initially published in two volumes, with some chapters appearing in Les Temps modernes ( Modern Times ), a journal de Beauvoir co-founded with philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre, the latter of whom she had an open romantic relationship with for about 50 years. The Second Sex was condensed for its 1953 English translation , and although it was banned by the Vatican until 1966, it helped pave the way for other quintessential second-wave feminist works, including Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique , which was published in 1963.

Credited by The New York Times with “creating modern feminism in a single, electrifying stroke,” de Beauvoir’s magnum opus would go on to resonate in other culturally significant ways, too. In 1986, screenwriter Daniel Waters began work on what would later become the 1989 teen-comedy satire Heathers . Yet part of his inspiration for the script came years earlier, when he came across a copy of The Second Sex while still in high school.

“I thought this was great stuff for a movie, the way girls maintain their own oppression,” Waters told The New York Times in 1989. “I’m sure I'm the only person who ever read that book and said, ‘Hey, there’s money to be made.’” And with that, one could argue that The Second Sex helped inadvertently launch a whole sub-genre for teen comedies, including not only Heathers , but 2004’s Mean Girls (which Waters’s younger brother, Mark, actually directed).  —SM

33. Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do

How do everyday workers feel about their jobs? In this landmark 1974 oral history, writer and historian Studs Terkel set out to discover exactly that. Over the course of three years, he interviewed more than 130 men and women across the U.S.—including teachers, farmers, actors, supermarket workers, housewives, and even a gravedigger—about how they earned a living, but more importantly, whether or not they actually enjoyed it.

The end result is a work that, in Terkel’s words, is as much about “a search … for daily meaning,” as it is about “daily bread,” and about the hunger for “a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”

In a 1974 review , New York Times writer Marshall Berman described Terkel’s oral history as symbolic of the American Popular Front idealism of the era—as in, “a vision of a genuinely democratic community” filled with people from every race, class, and occupation, all striving to overcome barriers by finding solidarity within each other’s common struggles—while also crediting it with giving rise to a new type of idealism, one “more honest and genuine” about the working world, and reflective of people’s changing attitudes toward their professional lives.

Modern scholars have argued that Working functions as an important time capsule of sorts, showcasing “an old 20th century way of doing business,” as The Chicago Tribune put it , before the advent of the Information Age. Sometime around 2014, Radio Diaries and Project& gained exclusive access to the tapes of Terkel’s Working interviews and co-produced a series on them for NPR. Others have since linked the oral history to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the struggles faced by essential workers during quarantine, suggesting that as much as the book reflects change, Working ’s overarching intent—to amplify the voices of ordinary folks searching for value and meaning within their jobs—remains as timely today as it ever was.  —SM

34. Frankenstein

The origin story of Frankenstein is nearly as famous as the novel itself. In 1816, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her future husband Percy Bysshe Shelley spent the summer in Switzerland with Lord Byron and John Polidori. The story goes that one rainy evening, Byron challenged the group to a ghost story contest. After an initial bout of writer’s block, Godwin came up with an idea that would cement her as the clear winner. She started writing her novel about a monster made up of reanimated body parts at age 18 and had it published at age 20. In addition to creating one of the most iconic characters in literature (and later film ), Mary Shelley is credited with inventing the science fiction novel and shaping the modern horror genre. —MD  

35. Gone With the Wind

Published in 1936, Margaret Mitchell’s first and only published novel was a sensation unlike anything else encountered before. The tome—which clocked in at just over a thousand pages and weighed about 3.5 pounds— sold 1 million copies within the first six months of its release and later earned the Pulitzer Prize for Novel (later Fiction) in 1937.

While a 2014 Harris poll revealed that it’s still among America’s favorite books of all time, the Civil War and Reconstruction-era set novel has also seen its fair share of detractors over the years, with many critics arguing that the book (and its 1939 film adaptation ) helped propagate dangerous myths surrounding the antebellum south, the “ Lost Cause ,” and the notion of “contented” slavery. In her 2022 book The Wrath to Come: ‘Gone with the Wind’ and the Lies America Tells , author Sarah Churchwell refers to it as “a thousand-page novel about enslavers busily pretending that slavery doesn’t matter—which is pretty much the story of American history.”

Not only that, but the book’s defense of the Ku Klux Klan and reliance on racial caricatures (like the “ mammy figure ”) have been widely condemned in recent years; in 2020, HBO Max (now Max) even briefly removed the film adaptation from its catalog, citing its “racist depictions” of Black characters. In an interview with CNN, author Alice Randall—who wrote The Wind Done Gone , a 2001 retelling of Gone With the Wind from the perspective of a former enslaved person—described the original book’s use of racial caricatures as “poisonous,” and noted that within her own work, she was attempting to “create an antidote to the poison” and push back against the “myth of Black intellectual inferiority,” which Gone With the Wind helped to perpetuate.  —SM

36. How to Win Friends and Influence People

The title may sound trite, but Dale Carnegie’s 1936 self-help book about gaining confidence and trust, which is based on his lectures, has won over readers and influenced them for decades. The advice inside is obvious: smile more, talk less, listen a lot. Yet for tens of millions, it has resonated. Warren Buffett once hung his certificate from Carnegie’s course in his office; Charles Manson was reportedly also a reader. —JR   

37. Ain’t I A Woman?

In her speech at the 1851 Akron, Ohio, women’s rights convention, Sojourner Truth—a formerly enslaved woman—asked white suffragettes whether she qualified as a woman in their eyes, as she didn’t share many of the qualities that defined their version of womanhood. Many women at the center of the suffrage movement advocated for their own rights and left women of color as an afterthought, and Truth’s speech provided an important critique of feminism during its first wave. (Though it’s likely that she never asked the famous question. The version of Truth’s speech published in 1851 doesn’t have it—the closest it gets is “I am a woman’s rights.” Then, 12 years later, Frances Gage published her recollections of the speech, seemingly changing Truth’s likely Dutch-accented speech patterns to Southern speech patterns—as well as many of the words—and having Truth say “ar’n’t I a woman?” The ain’t variant had become popular by the 1880s.)

Published in the waning point of feminism’s second wave, bell hooks’s book, Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism , continues Truth’s dissection of the gender binary through a racial lens, asserting that race and gender are part of the same animal. hooks’s examination of racism and sexism as an intertwined force helped foster conversations of intersectionality and inclusivity throughout the third and fourth waves of feminism. —BA

38. Grimms’ Fairy Tales

The fairy tales and other folk stories collected and published by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in a series of seven editions throughout the early to mid-19th century are important for the very simple reason that they’re still ubiquitous in Western culture today: A new adaptation of Hansel and Gretel or Snow White materializes seemingly every time you blink.

But they aren’t only important for that reason. In fact, initially, the Grimms weren’t trying to produce globally popular entertainment—or entertainment at all. They were German academics who collected German folklore not only to preserve it, but as a means of fostering a national identity among the many fractured demographics scattered all over a not-yet-unified Germany.

“[The Grimm brothers’ collecting] had everything to do with ‘artistically’ creating a German popular culture rooted in the belief systems and customs of the German people,” Jack Zipes wrote in his 2014 book Grimm Legacies : The Magic Spell of the Grimms’ Folk and Fairy Tales [ PDF ].

Their work inspired folklorists all over Europe and North America to do the same. These collectors began traveling around on the hunt for folk stories that hailed from oft-overlooked and under-represented parts of their countries.

“Not only did educated middle-class collectors give voice to the lower classes, but they also spoke out in defense of their native languages and in the interests of national and regional movements that sought more autonomy for groups with very particular interests,” Zipes explained. In this way, compiling folk stories was “a social and political act.” —EG

39. Hiroshima

Most readers who picked up the August 31, 1946, issue of The New Yorker had no way to prepare themselves for what was inside. The cover illustration depicted a carefree summer day at the park, but the editors had devoted virtually the entire issue to war correspondent John Hersey’s devastating account of the horrors wrought by the bombing of Hiroshima. Hersey’s narrative focuses on the experiences of six survivors—an approach inspired by Thornton Wilders’s 1927 novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey .

For most readers, Hiroshima was the first accurate account of the suffering caused by atomic warfare. Before it, Americans had only gotten watered-down, highly censored reports of the destruction caused by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Congress had even been told that radiation sickness was “a very pleasant way to die.” Hiroshima aggressively dismantled those lies with stomach-churning descriptions of the vast human suffering caused by the bombings. 

The issue sold out almost immediately, and Hersey’s story was quickly printed in book form by Alfred A. Knopf; the influential Book of the Month Club gave a free copy of its edition to almost a million subscribers on the grounds that hardly anything in print “could be of more importance at this moment to the human race.” Full radio readings were broadcast in several countries, and newspapers around the world printed it, with editorials insisting that Hersey’s story be read. Thanks to Hersey, writes author Lesley M.M. Blume, the horror of nuclear war was now “a matter of permanent, policy-influencing international record.” —AS

40. Things Fall Apart

Before Things Fall Apart was published in 1958, the story of the European invasion and colonization of Africa had been told almost entirely from the perspective of white writers and historians. Nigerian author Chinua Achebe changed that with his debut novel about a respected member of an Igbo clan whose life unravels after he kills a boy in the village. Partly conceived as a response to the reductive and racist depictions of African characters in some popular books of the time, Things Fall Apart was one of the first African novels to achieve global acclaim, and one of the first widely read works to explore the devastating impact of European colonization. It laid the groundwork for African literature as we know it today and helped dispel the notion of Africa as “the Dark Continent.”

Philosopher and ethicist Kwame Anthony Appiah has called Things Fall Apart “a starting point for the modern African novel.” To ask how Achebe influenced African literature, Appiah wrote, “would be like asking how Shakespeare influenced English writers or Pushkin influenced Russians.” —AS

41. De revolutionibus orbium coelestium ( On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres )

One can hardly blame Nicolaus Copernicus for holding off on publishing his revolutionary work De Revolutionibus for more than a decade after it was technically finished: The book, which he had labored over from 1515 to 1532 before revising and finally sending it off to be published in 1543, sought to upend beliefs—both scientific and religious—held since the 5th century BCE : That the Earth was at the center of the universe and all other heavenly bodies moved around it. Copernicus argued that the Earth and its Moon, along with all other heavenly bodies, revolved around the Sun. In a foreword to the volume addressed to Pope Paul III, Copernicus wrote, “I can readily imagine, Holy Father, that as soon as some people hear that in this volume, which I have written about the revolutions of the spheres of the universe, I ascribe certain motions to the terrestrial globe, they will shout that I must be immediately repudiated together with this belief.”

Copernicus wasn’t the first to hold this view, but unlike his predecessors, he worked out the details using math rather than physics (the title page even reads “Let no one untrained in geometry enter here”). He got certain things right—arguing, for example, that the Earth spun on its axis as it traveled around the sun and said that wobbling of the axis caused equinoxes. He also got things wrong: His system isn’t particularly simpler or better than the old geocentric model (that would have to wait for Johannes Kepler).

Copernicus didn’t live to see the effects of De Revolutionibus : He died in May 1543, reportedly rousing just long enough before passing to hold his book. As expected, he was widely criticized, and De Revolutionibus was eventually banned by the Vatican. It would take another century for Copernicus’s idea to become accepted, but De Revolutionibus would eventually influence the likes of Kepler and Galileo on the way toward upending everything we thought we knew about our corner of the universe. —EM

Henry David Thoreau went into the woods outside Concord, Massachusetts, in 1845 because he wished to “live deliberately.” The two years he spent in a homemade hut on the shore of Walden Pond—with frequent excursions to town, visits from friends, and a trip to climb Maine’s Mt. Katahdin—were an experiment in transcendentalism, in which he hoped to show that it was possible to work much less and live much more.

Walden, or, Life in the Woods shows Thoreau putting the transcendental values of self-reliance, civil disobedience, individualism, and the spirituality of nature into practice. It was a moderate seller upon its publication in 1854, but since then, its influence on American identity and ideas has grown. Walden articulated the rationales behind social justice, environmental conservation, and individual conscience in ways that are ever more relevant to our times. —KL

43. The King James Bible

While not the first English translation of biblical texts, the King James translation has become the most storied. Published in 1611 after a group of 47 scholars translated the Old Testament, New Testament, and Apocrypha from Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, the King James translation standardized the Bible into a text that was constant within churches and the home. Before its publication, the Bishop’s Bible was read in churches, and the Geneva Bible was read in domestic settings, and disparities led people to question the true meaning of the text.

Now, the King James Bible is the most widely printed English book in all of history. Christians across denominations have referenced it in sermons over the centuries, and the text itself even remains culturally relevant in secular spaces. In the words of the BBC , “No other book, or indeed any piece of culture, seems to have influenced the English language as much as the King James Bible.” Its poetic imagery and cadence lent itself to references in music and art across the centuries, from classics like Handel’s Messiah to contemporary references like in The Simpsons. —BA

44. How the Other Half Lives

The 19th century saw an extraordinary wave of immigration to the U.S. In the 30-year period from 1870 to 1900, nearly 12 million immigrants landed on U.S. shores. Many of them settled in New York City, where they lived at the mercy of predatory employers and slumlords who charged exorbitant rates for housing in filthy, appallingly overcrowded tenements. In 1890, journalist, photographer, and lecturer Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives , an incendiary exposé of living conditions in New York’s slums. Riis, a police reporter and an early pioneer of flash photography, had gone into the tenements himself to document the conditions there.

The response was immediate and dramatic. Riis’s book became a bestseller, offering readers what was often their first glimpse at the lives of impoverished workers and their families. Not long after it was published, Riis received a message from U.S. Civil Service commissioner Theodore Roosevelt: “I have read your book, and I have come to help.” When Roosevelt went to New York to head up the city’s Board of Police Commissioners, he made good on his promise. Besides purging the NYPD of corrupt officers, diversifying the police force, and instituting firearms training for the city’s police, Roosevelt shuttered the city’s police lodging houses and, according to Roosevelt biographer Kathleen Dalton, “set up a new system of municipal lodging houses, which was what Riis had wanted for years.” Riis’s book also prompted New York officials to begin the process of improving living conditions in the city’s tenements.

How the Other Half Lives is considered a fundamental work of muckraking journalism, and it demonstrated the power of photography to inspire social change. It became a formative influence for prominent activists to come, including labor secretary Frances Perkins , who was a key figure in establishing Social Security, the minimum wage, and other pivotal New Deal reforms. —AS

45. The Wealth of Nations

Few books can define an entire society. When they do, it’s not often with any brevity. The Wealth of Nations , Scottish economist Adam Smith’s massive tome on economic policy, arrived in 1776 with a thunderclap. (Or something close, provided you dropped it on the floor.) As the late journalist P.J. O’Rourke put it, Smith describes three basic tenets of financial prosperity for a country: freedom of trade, labor division, and owning up to one’s own self-interest. (“Even intellectuals should have no trouble” with the basic concepts, O’Rourke noted.) With division of labor comes trade; with trade (hopefully) comes wealth. That wealth was not simply piles of cash, Smith wrote , but in the products bought and sold in a competitive marketplace—an idea that countered the conventional thinking of the era, which was that hoarding was best and importing or exporting goods was to be avoided.

Would someone have voiced support for hese basic tenets of classical economics if not for Smith? Most likely—indeed, others were working on similar ideas. And while historians debate the myths and misunderstandings surrounding the work, it is still The Wealth of Nations that became the by-word for the entire free-market economic system. —JR

46. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

When Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was published in 1970, America was already in a period of extraordinary civil unrest. The Kent State shootings and the Augusta civil rights riot had occurred in May; details of the Mỹ Lai massacre were still coming to light, and distrust of the federal government was high. Hitting bookstores just two years after the 1968 establishment of the American Indian Movement, Dee Brown’s book was a radical retelling of the country’s history, centering its narrative on Indigenous people rather than European settlers and their descendants, with a focus on the American West.

At a time when the average white American’s views of Native Americans was shaped more by Hollywood Westerns than reality, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee forced people to reconsider the popular narrative of westward expansion and its fallout. It wasn’t just Americans of European descent who were jolted by the book; Brown’s bestseller is credited with setting the stage for a wave of Native American activism. Some historians draw a straight line between the book and the Wounded Knee occupation that began in February 1973, which resulted in the shooting deaths of two Native American men at the hands of federal agents.

Many historians think Brown overcorrected, portraying Native Americans as passive victims, and some have taken the book to task for creating the impression that Native American history essentially ended with the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890. But its lasting impact is undeniable; when Brown died in 2002, The Guardian called Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee the book that “demolished for ever the heroic myth of America’s conquest of the west.” —AS  

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45 best history books of all time.

If the mere mention of ‘history books’ is enough to conjure up memories of fighting back yawns in your middle school classroom, then chances are you haven’t been looking in the right places. But fear not — this list is here to bring you some of the most well-researched, entertaining, and readable works by the most preeminent historians of today and generations past.

On this list, you not only find some of the best American history books, on topics spanning slavery and empire, Civil War, and Indigenous histories, but also stories ranging from Asia to Africa, and everywhere in between. This list traverses continents, historical eras, the rise and fall of once-great empires, while occasionally stopping off to hone in on specific, localized events that you might never have heard of.

Whether you’re a history buff looking to flex your muscles, or you struggle to distinguish your Nelson from your Nefertiti, there’ll be something suitable for you. So what are you waiting for? Let’s dive into our 45 best history books of all time.

If you’re looking for history books that give the broader picture as well as the finer details, let us introduce you to some of the most seminal texts on global history. These reads cover the moments and events that form the connective tissue between continents, cultures, and eras. Whether you’re looking for more abstract, theoretical writing on what ‘history’ is and does, or just a broader volume that pans out, rather than in, there’ll be something for you.

1. What Is History? by Edward Hallett Carr

Famous for his hefty History of Soviet Russia , E. H. Carr’s foray into historiography (that is, the study of written history) was panned by critics at first. Initially written off as ‘dangerous relativism’, it is now considered a foundational text for historians, one which probes at the very seams of the discipline. By asking what exactly historical knowledge is and what constitutes history as we have come to understand it, Carr provides a compelling and masterful critique of the biases of historians and their moralized narratives of history. This groundbreaking text also interrogates such notions as fact, science, morality, individualism, and society. Carr’s masterpiece is referenced in countless college applications for a reason — it’s a formidable dive into history as a discipline, and laid the foundations for the subject as it exists in the modern world.

2. The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx

Though first and foremost considered a political theorist, much of Marxist thought can be a means to understand history with attention to economic systems and principles. In this seminal text, Marx argues that all of history has been defined by the struggles between the proletariat working-class and the capital-owning bourgeoisie. According to Marx, economic structures have been defined by class relations, and the various revolutions that have occurred throughout history have been instigated by antagonism between these two forces. As Marx famously opined in his 1852 essay, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce”, and he lays out those repetitions with striking clarity here. As an added bonus, since this was originally intended as a pamphlet, the manifesto comes in at under 100 pages, so you have no reason not to prime yourself on one of modern history’s greatest thinkers.

3. Orientalism by Edward W. Said

A titan of Middle Eastern political and historical study, Edward Said coined the titular phrase ‘Orientalism’ to describe the West's often reductive and derisive depiction and portrayal of "The East." This book is an explanation of this concept and the application of this framework to understand the global power dynamics between the East and the West. Orientalism is considered by many a challenging read, but don’t let its formidable reputation put you off — it’ll all be worth it when you find yourself thinking about global history in ways you haven’t before.

4. Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen

It’s no big secret that the US school curriculum is more than a little biased — governments have a tendency to rewrite history textbooks in their favour, and the US government is no exception, keeping quiet on the grizzly, harrowing details and episodes which made the USA the country it is today. With particular focus on the American Civil War, Native Americans and the Atlantic Slave Trade, Loewen tries to interrogate and override simplistic, recountings of these events that portray White settlers as heroes and everybody else as uncivilized and barbarous. This is essential reading for anybody wanting to challenge their own preconceptions about American history and challenge the elevated status of American ‘heroes’.

5. Democracy: A Life by Paul Cartledge

From its birth in the city-state of Ancient Athens to contemporary times, democracy’s definition, application, and practice have been fiercely discussed and debated. With this book, Cartledge presents a biography of a political system that has been alternately lauded as the only means to govern a liberal society and derided as doomed to ineffectiveness.

Based on a near-legendary course of lectures Cartledge taught at Cambridge University, this book charts the social, cultural, and political dimensions of democracy, displaying a mastery of the scholarship to brilliant effect. For those that want to know more about democracy beyond ‘governance for the masses’.

6. Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary

When history is so often focalized through a Western lens, reading from alternative positions is essential to challenge these normative understandings of the past. Ansary’s Destiny Disrupted does exactly this. By centering on an Islamic recounting of historical events, it challenges preconceived ideas about Western dominance, colonialism, and stereotyped depictions of Islamic culture and custom. Ansary discusses the history of the Islamic world from the time of Mohammed, through the various empires that have ruled the Middle Eastern region and beyond, right up to contemporary conflicts and the status of Islam in a modern, globalizing world. 

7. Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky

If you think salt is a substance useful for not much more than topping fries, let journalist Mark Kurlansky prove otherwise. In this book, Kurlansky charts the origins of civilization using a surprising narrative throughline — salt. Many early settlements were established near natural sources of salt because of its many beneficial properties, and this surprisingly precious mineral has continued to play an important role in societies ever since. From its use as a medium of exchange in ancient times to its preservative properties (which allowed ancient civilizations to store essential food throughout the winter), this innocuous substance has been fundamental to the health and wealth of societies across the globe.

8. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

With his collective bibliography having sold over 16 million copies, you’re probably already familiar with Bryson’s work documenting his travels around the world, or his meditations on the brilliant diversity of global culture. Though primarily a travel writer, he’s also turned his hand to history, and A Short History of Nearly Everything specifically focuses on the scientific discoveries of yore that have defined human society. From quantum theory to mass extinction, Bryson recounts these miraculous, unplanned, sometimes ill-fated marvels of human achievement with humor and insight. If there’s a book that’ll have you repeatedly saying “can you believe this?” to random passers-by, this’ll be it!

9. The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World by Lincoln Paine

A nation's ability to conquer the seas has always been a mark of prestige and greatness, especially for empires looking to expand beyond their borders and nations wanting to trade and connect with other peoples. Paine discusses how many societies managed to transform the murky depths of the ocean from natural obstacle to a means of transporting goods, people, and ideas — from the Mesopotamians wanting to trade with their neighbors in ancient Aegea and Egypt, to those in East Asia who fine-tuned their shipbuilding techniques to conquer foreign lands.

10. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond

Here’s another book that frequents the reading lists of politics and history majors the world over! Many have theorized on why certain human societies have failed while others have thrived — but perhaps none have done it as astutely as Jared Diamond has in Guns, Germs, and Steel . The three things featured in the book’s title make up the nexus that Diamond presents as being fundamental to the development (or lack thereof) of human society. Though Diamond's thesis has as many detractors as it has supporters, it’s worth reading to see which side of the debate you fall on.

11. The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity by Amartya Sen

In this collection of sixteen essays, esteemed economist Amartya Sen explores the Indian subcontinent, with particular focus on the rich history and culture that has made it the country it is today. The title refers to what Sen believes is inherent to the Indian disposition: argument and constructive criticism as a means to further progress. In his essays, Sen presents careful and considered analysis on a range of subjects that other academics have often tiptoe around, from the nature of Hindu traditions to the major economic disparities existing in certain regions today (and what their roots might be). Whether you’re an expert or new to the topic, you’ll be sure to learn something from Sen’s incisive commentary.

Ancient kingdoms are shrouded in mystery — a lot of what we know has been painstakingly pieced together by brilliant archaeologists and historians who have uncovered ancient artifacts, documents, and remains, and dedicated their working lives to understanding their significance to ancient people. Aren’t the rest of us lucky they’ve done the hard work for us?

12. Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs by Camilla Townsend

The pre-colonial Central America ruled by the Aztecs was one characterized by remarkable innovation and progressiveness. Western historians, however, often failed to acknowledge this or pay the region and its ancient empires much academic attention. Moreover, the history of the Mexican people as recounted by the Spanish has often leaned into stereotyped, whitewashed versions of events. Townsend’s Fifth Sun changes this by presenting a history of the Aztecs solely using sources and documents written by the Aztec people themselves in their native Nahuatl language. What results is an empathetic and invigorating interpretation of Aztec history for newbies and long-time enthusiasts alike.

13. When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt by Kara Cooney

When you think of Ancient Egyptian queens, Cleopatra probably comes to mind — but did you know that the various Egyptian dynasties boasted a whole host of prominent women? Cooney’s When Women Ruled The World shifts the spotlight away from the more frequently discussed Egyptian pharaohs, placing attention on the likes of Hatshepsut, Nefertiti, and Cleopatra, all of whom commanded great armies, oversaw the conquering of new lands, and implemented innovative economic systems. In this captivating read, Cooney reveals more about these complex characters and explores why accounts of ancient empires have been so prone to placing powerful women on the margins of historical narratives. 

14. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 1 by Edward Gibbon

If you’re a fan of serious, in-depth scholarship on ancient history, then this first volume of Gibbon's classic treatise on the Roman Empire is a perfect fit for you. Despite being published in 1776, Gibbon’s work on the Roman Empire is still revered by historians today. Along with five other volumes of this monumental work, this text is considered one of the most comprehensive and pre-eminent accounts in the field. Gibbon offers theories on exactly how and why the Roman Empire fell, arguing controversially that it succumbed to barbarian attacks mainly due to the decline of “civic virtue” within Roman culture. If this thesis has piqued your interest, then we naturally suggest you start with Volume I to understand what exactly Gibbon considers “virtue” to be, and how it was lost. 

15. The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome by Susan Wise Bauer

Historians are often wont to focus on a particular historical era or location when producing historical nonfiction — but Susan Wise Bauer had grander ambitions. In this text, Bauer weaves together events that spanned continents and eras, from the East to the Americas. This book, described as an “engrossing tapestry,” primarily aims to connect tales of rulers to the everyday lives of those they ruled in vivid detail. With an eloquently explained model, she reveals how the ancient world shaped, and was shaped by, its peoples.

16. Foundations of Chinese Civilization: The Yellow Emperor to the Han Dynasty by Jing Liu

Believe it or not, history doesn’t always mean slogging through page after page of dense, footnoted text. This comic by Beijing native Jing Liu turns history on its head by presenting it in a fun, digestible manner for anybody that has an interest in Chinese history (but isn’t quite ready to tackle an 800-page book on the subject yet). Spanning nearly 3,000 years of ancient history, this comic covers the Silk Road, the birth of Confucianism and Daoism, China's numerous internal wars, and finally the process of modern unification.

Middle Ages and renaissance

Some of the most fearsome and formidable characters in history had their heyday during the Middle Ages and renaissance periods — though it’s hard to know whether their larger-than-life reputations are owed to actual attributes they had, or from their mythologizing during a time where fewer reliable sources exist. Either way, we think they’re great fun to read about — as are their various exploits and conquests. From Genghis Khan to Cosimo de Medici, we’ve got you covered.

17. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan

The Silk Road, an artery of commerce running from Europe through Russia to Asia (and a vital means of connecting the West with the East), has long been of interest to historians of the old world. In this book, Frankopan goes one step further, to claim that there has been more than one silk road throughout history — and that the region stretching from the Mediterranean to China (modern-day Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan) remains the crossroads of civilization and the center of global affairs. Frankopan argues compellingly that this region should be afforded more attention when historians theorize on centers of power and how they have shifted across time. It’s a convincing argument, and one that is expertly executed by Frankopan’s engaging writing and scrupulous research.

18. Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford

Genghis Khan is perhaps one of the most formidable figures in global history. Many recognize his iconic topknot-and-horseback image despite not knowing all too much about his life or the military successes he oversaw as leader of the Mongolian empire. Weatherford’s book takes a deep dive into this complex character and explores new dimensions of the society and culture he imposed upon the many peoples he conquered. As a civilization, Khan's was more keenly progressive than its European counterparts — having abolished torture, granted religious freedoms, and deposed the feudal systems that subordinated so many to so few. If you’re in the mood for an epic tale that’ll challenge your understanding of the global past, you’ll want to pick this book up.

19. Precolonial Black Africa by Cheikh Anta Diop

Cheikh Anta Diop, a Senegalese historian, anthropologist, physicist, and politician, dedicated his working life to the study of pre-colonial African culture and the origins of human civilization itself. This book, arguably his most influential text, draws out comparisons between European empires and societies with the often overlooked African civilizations. Diop carefully shows that Africa contributed far more to the world’s development than just its exploited labor and natural resources. Precolonial Black Africa thus sets out to reorient our knowledge of a period that is so often derided by non-African thinkers as “uncivilized” and “barbarous” with brilliant attention to detail.

20. The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land by Thomas Asbridge

In the 11th century, a vast Christian army was summoned and ordered by the Pope to march across Europe. Their aim was to seize Jerusalem and claim back the city considered the holy seat of Christianity. As it happened, Jerusalem was also a land strongly associated with the Prophets of Islam. The Christian mission thus manifested in the Crusaders’ rampage through the Muslim world, devastating many parts of the Eastern Mediterranean. Asbridge’s innovative recounting of this momentous event is unique in the way it even-handedly unpacks the perspective of both the Christian and Muslim experiences and their memorializing of the Holy Wars. With rich and detailed scholarship, this book reveals how the Crusades shaped the Medieval world and continue to impact the present day.

21. The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall by Christopher Hibbert

Renaissance Florence is perhaps most famous as the cradle of revered art, sculpture, and architecture by the likes of Michelangelo and Leonardo — but in the 15th century, it was also home to the Medicis, one of the most powerful banking dynasties in Europe. Starting with enterprising Cosimo de Medici in the 1430s, Hibbert chronicles the impressive rise of a family that dominated a city where mercantile families jostled for political and social influence, often to bloody ends. And — spoiler alert, if you can spoil history — as with every great period, the rise of the Medicis naturally involves a spectacular fall. It’s the kind of stuff soap operas are made of: an unmissable tale of family intrigue and the corrupting influence of money. 

In this groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology, Charles C. Mann radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492. Contrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land around them. The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water and immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city. Mexican cultures created corn in a specialized breeding process that it has been called man’s first feat of genetic engineering. Indeed, Indians were not living lightly on the land but were landscaping and manipulating their world in ways that we are only now beginning to understand. Challenging and surprising, this a transformative new look at a rich and fascinating world we only thought we knew.

22. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann

Mainstream history has too often made it seem as though the Americas was all but a vacant wasteland before Columbus and other European conquerors drifted upon its shores in the 15th century. Of course, this couldn’t be further from the truth — from the Aztecs to the Incas to the tribes of Northern America, many complex social and cultural structures existed prior to the arrival of Europeans. Southern American peoples in particular had sophisticated societies and infrastructures (including running water!) that have unfortunately been obliviated from the popular (or at least white Western) consciousness. A classic book that challenges the victor’s story, Charles C. Mann’s 1491 provides exciting new information on civilizations that have more to teach us than we have previously acknowledged. 

23. The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England by Dan Jones

Is there a more abiding emblem of British history than that of Medieval England’s monarchy and the Wars of the Roses? Though its historical figures and events have often been portrayed in television dramas, plays, and books, little is commonly known about the House of Plantagenets, who ruled from the 12th to the 15th century — an era packed with royal drama, intrigue, and internal division. For a witty, acerbic account of the whole ordeal, visit Dan Jones’s The Plantagenets . He approaches the subject with dazzling storytelling skills and charm that it will feel like you’re reading a novel, not a nonfiction book.

Enlightenment, empire, and revolution

You can’t make sense of the present without understanding the forces that got us here. The mechanized and globalized, mass-producing and mass-consuming world we live in today was forged in the fiery hearth of the Industrial Revolution, on the decks of ships setting out in search of uncharted territory, and in battles that were fought over supposedly ‘undiscovered’ lands. A lot changed for the common man in this period, and a lot has been written about it too — here are some of the best works.

24. The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective by Robert C. Allen

The Industrial Revolution is perhaps the most important phenomenon in modern history. It started in 18th-century Britain, where inventions like the mechanical loom and the steam engine were introduced, changing the nature of work and production. But why did this happen in Britain and not elsewhere in the world, and how precisely did it change things? These questions are answered lucidly in Robert C. Allen’s informative book. From the preconditions for growth to the industries and trades that grew out of them, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspectives has it all covered. Though it leans a bit on the academic side, it provides valuable knowledge that will vastly improve your understanding of today’s mass-producing, mass-consuming world.

25. A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

For an overview of the history of the US, try this impressive treatise by historian and political scientist Howard Zinn. There’s a reason why this book is so often assigned as mandatory reading for high school and college history courses — it challenges readers to rethink what they’ve been told about America’s past. Rather than focusing on ‘great’ men and their achievements, A People’s History dives unflinchingly into the societal conditions and changes of the last few centuries. Exploring the motives behind events like the Civil War and US international interventions in the 20th century, Zinn shows that while patriotism and morality have often been used to justify America’s social movements and wars, it’s often been economic growth and wealth accumulation that truly drove leaders’ decisions.

26. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown

At Wounded Knee Creek in 1890, the Lakota people confronted the encroaching US Army to protect their homeland and community. What followed was a massacre that for decades was viewed as a heroic victory — exemplifying how history is truly shaped by the victors, unless someone else speaks up. In 2010, Dee Brown did just this, exploring the colonialist treatment that Indigenous Americans suffered throughout the late 19th century in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Using council records and personal accounts from people of various Native American tribes, Brown demonstrates just how destructive the US administration was to these communities: in the name of Manifest Destiny and building new infrastructure, white settlers destroyed the culture and heritage of the Indigenous population. It’s something that's sadly still too familiar now, making this an even more pressing read.

27. Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 by Ibram X. Kendi

While this isn’t strictly a history book, Four Hundred Souls is certainly an eye-opening volume if you’re looking to explore oft-hidden aspects of history. This collection of essays, personal reflections, and short stories is written by ninety different authors, all providing unique insights into the experiences of Black Americans throughout history. Editors Kendi and Blain do a brilliant job of amalgamating a variety of emotions and perspectives: from the pains of slavery and its legacy to the heartfelt poetry of younger generations. If you’re looking for your fix of African American Literature and nonfiction in one go, consider this your go-to.

Since its U.S. debut a quarter-century ago, this brilliant text has set a new standard for historical scholarship of Latin America. It is also an outstanding political economy, a social and cultural narrative of the highest quality, and perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation since Marx.

Rather than chronology, geography, or political successions, Eduardo Galeano has organized the various facets of Latin American history according to the patterns of five centuries of exploitation. Thus he is concerned with gold and silver, cacao and cotton, rubber and coffee, fruit, hides and wool, petroleum, iron, nickel, manganese, copper, aluminum ore, nitrates, and tin. These are the veins which he traces through the body of the entire continent, up to the Rio Grande and throughout the Caribbean, and all the way to their open ends where they empty into the coffers of wealth in the United States and Europe.

Weaving fact and imagery into a rich tapestry, Galeano fuses scientific analysis with the passions of a plundered and suffering people. An immense gathering of materials is framed with a vigorous style that never falters in its command of themes. All readers interested in great historical, economic, political, and social writing will find a singular analytical achievement, and an overwhelming narrative that makes history speak, unforgettably.

This classic is now further honored by Isabel Allende’s inspiring introduction. Universally recognized as one of the most important writers of our time, Allende once again contributes her talents to literature, to political principles, and to enlightenment.

28. Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Eduardo Galeano

The instabilities of Latin America over the last century have largely stemmed from its turbulent and violent past, its land and people having been exploited by European imperial powers, followed by American interventionism. In Open Veins of Latin America, Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano passionately and compellingly recounts this history while also keeping it accessible to modern readers. Still on the fence? Let the foreword by Latinx literary giant Isabel Allende convince you: “Galeano denounces exploitation with uncompromising ferocity, yet this book is almost poetic in its description of solidarity and human capacity for survival in the midst of the worst kind of despoliation.”

29. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano Illustrated by Olaudah Equiano

Though it was published in the late 18th century, this autobiography is still being reprinted today. It follows the life of Equiano, a slave who was kidnapped from his village in Nigeria and trafficked to Britain. In this foreign land, he was traded like merchandise time and again, struggling against adversity to find his freedom and define his identity. The accuracy of the story has been called into question, which is why reprinted editions have footnotes and additional details to better explain the social context of the situation. Regardless, the narrative style of the book makes it a hypnotizing read, immersing readers in the world of Georgian England and the horrors of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.

The World Wars

We thought the biggest events of the 20th century deserved their own section. The fact that so many people across the globe lived to experience these two momentous, destructive wars is perhaps why so much has been written about them — and how they reinvented life as we know it. The books below, covering a variety of perspectives, will intrigue, surprise, and hopefully teach you a thing or two.

30. Ten Days That Shook The World by John Reed

If you’re interested in firsthand accounts of people who've lived through historical moments, then this is the book for you. Published in 1919, Ten Days that Shook the World is the thrilling political memoir of someone who witnessed the October Revolution unfold in St Petersburg, Russia. Reed was a socialist and a newspaper correspondent who happened to be in close contact with the likes of Lenin and Trotsky, aka the innermost circle of the Bolsheviks. His account of the revolution thus provides a very unique perspective — one of both an insider and an outsider. While Reed couldn’t be as impartial as he intended as a journalist, this book is still a useful insight into one of the most important moments in modern history.

31. The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman

If you’re a fan of history books, then you’ve probably heard of Barbara Tuchman: she was a historian and author who twice won the Pulitzer Prize, once for this very book. In The Guns of August , Tuchman uncovers the beginnings of World War I. She starts by examining the alliances and military plans that each country had in case of warfare, demonstrating how delicate this moment was before the declarations and the first battles on various fronts. The militaristic theme of the book could’ve made the tone dry, yet Tuchman lets the stories unravel in a way that intrigues and enthralls. As the granddaughter of the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Tuchman was in Constantinople as the war began, and as a result, her work takes on the gravity of someone who was in the thick of it.,

32. Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War by Tim Bouverie

In the 1930s, when Hitler was making moves to acquire land from neighboring countries, the rest of the Allies pursued a policy they called appeasement. In the book of the same name (previously known as Appeasing Hitler ), the reasoning behind such a policy — despite the Nazis’ blatant antisemitism and aggressive nationalism — reveals how that led to World War II. Spoiler alert: ironically, this was all done with the assumption that if Hitler got what he wanted, there wouldn’t be another large-scale war that would last another four years. As informative as it is, Appeasement is also a valuable reminder that what happened in the past wasn’t a given — at that moment in time, things could have gone any number of ways. What matters, looking back, is what we can learn from it for the future.

33. Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 by Anna Reid

From historical fiction novels like Atonement to the somber box office hit Dunkirk , our mainstream knowledge about the Second World War has predominantly featured the French Western Front. Possibly because American forces were much more involved in this side of the war, we tend to overlook the biggest battles, which took place in Eastern Europe.

In Leningrad , Anna Reid sheds a light on one of these epic battles. Breaking Hitler’s vow of non-aggression, German forces poured into the Soviet Union in the autumn of 1941, expecting a quick victory. Little did they know that Leningrad (modern-day St Petersburg) was not about to go down without a vicious fight. Over the next three years, this massive city was put under a siege that resulted in destruction, famine, and countless deaths, though the Germans were ultimately defeated. What was life like in this prolonged blockade, and was it truly a Soviet victory? You’ll have to read Leningrad to find out.

34. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II by John W. Dower

As the only country to have been a victim of nuclear attacks, Japan’s postwar experience has arguably been one of the most unique and difficult of all the countries that took part in the world wars. Prior to and during WW2, Japan was a major power that had annexed much of East Asia by 1941. After the war, Japan was a defeated nation, strong-armed into surrendering by the Soviet army and two American atomic bombs.

Embracing Defeat is about a nation coming to terms with its new reality in the following years, during which the US-occupied Japan and was actively involved in its rebuilding. Shock, devastation, and humiliation were just a few of the emotions that society had to live through. In this Pulitzer Prize-winning book, MIT professor John Dower explores these sentiments and how they translated into social and cultural changes in Japan.

35. Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the 20th Century by Konrad H. Jarausch

Over the course of the 20th century, Germany truly experienced all possible transformations. From a key European imperial power to an economically crippled state, to Nazism and the Holocaust, and then to Cold War partition — there’s certainly been no shortage of tumult in Germany over the past hundred years. Collecting stories from over 60 people who lived through these ups and downs, Konrad Jarausch presents a down-to-earth picture of what it was like to undergo these changes in everyday life. While we often see historical changes as a given in hindsight, for the people who lived through the period, these transformations were sometimes far from foreseeable — yet have been formative to their individual and collective identities.

It’s remarkable to consider what humanity has achieved in the last century alone, from the first manned flight to landing people on the moon. But that’s not all: world wars were fought, empires were toppled, living conditions improved for many across the world and human rights were advanced in ways many would not have been able to fathom even a few decades before. To absorb more of our “modern” history, peruse the books below.

36. Stalin's Englishman: Guy Burgess, the Cold War, and the Cambridge Spy Ring by Andrew Lownie

If you’re a fan of thrilling spy novels , then Stalin’s Englishman is the history book for you: it’s the biography of Guy Burgess, an English-born Soviet spy from the 1930s onward. In a way, Burgess was made for the job — he was born into a wealthy family, attended prestigious schools like Eton and Cambridge, worked at the BBC and then for MI6, making him entirely beyond suspicion in the eyes of his own people. Though little is officially recorded about Burgess’s life, Andrew Lownie has compiled plenty of oral evidence related to this charming spy, weaving together an exciting narrative that will keep you turning the pages.

37. The State of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence by Martin Meredith

Since the end of World War II, Africa has seen several waves of independence movements. And while it was once a vision of hope, the effects of colonialism have frequently made post-independence life in Africa unstable and dangerous. Martin Meredith looks into the nuances of this legacy and how it has played out in the post-independence era. Rather than focusing on individual countries, Meredith widens his scope and presents a thorough overview of the continent, making this book an essential read for anyone new to modern African history.

38. Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991 by Eric Hobsbawm

Eric Hobsbawm is a well-known Marxist historian, and so it’s no surprise that his account of 20th-century history leans on the critical side. The Age of Extremes is all about failures: of communism, of state socialism, of market capitalism, and even of nationalism. 

Dividing the century into three parts — the Age of Catastrophe, the Golden Age, and the Landslide — Hobsbawm tracks Western powers and their struggles with world wars, economic failures, and new world orders that involved them losing colonies and influence. In their place, new systems rose to prominence, though all exhibited fundamental faults that made it difficult for them to last. The Age of Extremes is not a jovial read, but it provides an interesting perspective on modern world history. If you’re up for some harsh social commentary, you should definitely pick this book up.

39. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War by Viet Thanh Nguyen

The Vietnam War, as it is commonly called in the US, still looms large in the American imagination. But while the trauma and camaraderie of American soldiers in the tropical jungles of Vietnam have often been often highlighted, shamefully little has been said about the sufferings of the Vietnamese people — both those who remained in Vietnam and those who eventually left as “boat people.”

The gap in mainstream memory of this heavily politicized war is what Viet Thanh Nguyen addresses in his thought-provoking nonfiction book, Nothing Ever Dies . Having lived through the tail end of that conflict himself, Nguyen offers a perspective that’s too often swept under the rug. Through his writing, he reminds readers that history as we know it is often selective and subjective; it’s more than what we choose to remember, it’s also about why we choose to remember the things we do, and how sinister political motives that can factor in.

40. Age Of Ambition : Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China by Evan Osnos

History isn’t all about the distant past, and with such rapid changes over the last several decades, the contemporary history of China grows ever more fascinating by the year. Following economic reforms in the 1980s, China has grown exponentially and become one of the biggest economies in the world. But this opening up also meant that the Communist Party could no longer control the people’s discourses as effectively as before. In Age of Ambition , Evan Osnos draws on his firsthand observations as a journalist in China, talking about the recent transformation of Chinese people’s aspirations and plans to reach beyond the border of their country through their studies, their work, their consumption, and their communications.

41. Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe

If you think history can’t be gripping, then let Patrick Radden Keefe convince you otherwise: in this modern history book, he uses a murder investigation as a window into the bitter ethno-nationalist conflict in Northern Ireland. The book begins in 1972, in the middle of the Troubles — a 30-year conflict between the Catholic Irish, who wanted to leave the UK, and the Protestants who wanted to stay. A 38-year-old woman by the name of Jean McConville, married to a Catholic former soldier of the British Army, has disappeared. The suspects are members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), known to have executed people they believed were spying on them for the British. All deny the accusation, of course — some even going as far as to deny their involvement in the IRA altogether. Looking back at the incident and its suspects four decades later, Keefe highlights the atrocities that were committed by all parties during this period, and how they still resonate through NI today.

42. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

An esteemed researcher of African American literature and history, Hartman has produced a trove of work on the practices and legacies of slavery in the US. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is but one of the insightful titles she’s produced, discussing the lives of Black women in late 19th-century New York and Philadelphia. Looking at the concept and understanding of sexuality in these communities, Hartman found that despite the criminalization practiced by the state, there was space for women to own their sexuality and gender identity. It was a small space, and it would have slipped into oblivion if no one cared to explore the nuances of the urbanizing life of the 1890s — but this book ensures that they can never be left in the dust.

43. Black and British: A Forgotten History by David Olusoga

This book, written to accompany the 4-episode docuseries of the same name, is a must-read for everyone interested in British history. The common understanding of this island nation’s history is usually related to its seaborne conquests and longstanding monarchies. But what of the servants and slaves, the people that actually did the work and fought the battles? What of the people who were moved here through colonial exchanges? Retracing British history with an eye upon the waves of immigration, Olusoga gives a comprehensive overview of the complexity of Black Britishness in the UK, a group whose stories are often obscured. He also shows that these people were and are integral to the nation’s development, and are thus not to be forgotten.

44. The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson

For those who enjoy storytelling, check out this thrilling novel-style history book on H. H. Holmes, the man considered to be one of the first modern serial killers. Holmes was only ever convicted for one murder but is thought to have had up to 27 victims, many lured to the World’s Fair Hotel that he owned. The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago is thus the immersive setting of The Devil in the White City , and is written from the point of view of the designers who contributed to the fair. It reads like suspense — think The Alienist — but it also informs on the excitement and uncertainty of the early stages of urbanization, coming together as a marvelous blend of mystery novel and true crime . 

45. Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala by Stephen Schlesinger

In 1954, Guatemalan President Árbenz was overthrown. As with many Cold War-era coups in Asia and Latin America, the US was heavily involved in the plot. Even more absurdly, one of the main forces lobbying for this intervention was the United Fruit Company, which has been benefiting from labor exploitation in Guatemala. The result of this was the installation of an undemocratic and oppressive government, supremely heightened political unrest, and ultimately a prolonged civil war. Bitter Fruit dives into the rationales (or rather irrationalities) behind American involvement, highlighting the powerful paranoia that underlay many decisions throughout the Cold War.

Seeking more fodder for your non-fiction shelf? Why not check out the 60 best non-fiction books of the 21st century !

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The Best Books of 2021

This Year's Must-Reads

The Ten Best History Books of 2021

Our favorite titles of the year resurrect forgotten histories and help explain how the U.S. got to where it is today

Meilan Solly

Associate Editor, History

After 2020 brought the most devastating global pandemic in a century and a national reckoning with systemic racism , 2021 ushered in a number of welcome developments, including Covid vaccines , the return of beloved social traditions like the Olympics and public performances , and incremental but measurable progress in the fight   against racial injustice . 

During this year of change, these ten titles collectively serve a dual purpose. Some offer a respite from reality, transporting readers to such varied locales as ancient Rome, Gilded Age America and Angkor in Cambodia. Others reflect on the fraught nature of the current moment, detailing how the nation’s past—including the mistreatment of Japanese Americans during World War II and police brutality—informs its present and future. From a chronicle of civilization told through clocks to a quest for Indigenous justice in colonial Pennsylvania, these were some of our favorite history books of 2021.

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age by Annalee Newitz

“It’s terrifying to realize that most of humanity lives in places that are destined to die,” writes Annalee Newitz in the opening pages of Four Lost Cities . This stark statement sets the stage for the journalist’s incisive exploration of how cities collapse—a topic with clear ramifications for the “global-warming present,” as Kirkus notes in its review of the book. Centered on the ancient metropolises of Çatalhöyük , a Neolithic settlement in southern Anatolia; Pompeii , the Roman city razed by Mount Vesuvius’ eruption in 79 C.E.; Angkor , the medieval Cambodian capital of the Khmer Empire; and Cahokia , a pre-Hispanic metropolis in what is now Illinois, Four Lost Cities traces its subjects’ successes and failures, underscoring surprising connections between these ostensibly disparate societies. 

All four cities boasted sophisticated infrastructure systems and ingenious feats of engineering. Angkor, for instance, became an economic powerhouse in large part due to its complex network of canals and reservoirs, while Cahokia was known for its towering earthen pyramids , which locals imbued with spiritual significance. Despite these innovations, the featured urban hubs eventually succumbed to what Newitz describes as “prolonged periods of political instability”—often precipitated by poor leadership and social hierarchies—“coupled with environmental collapse.” These same problems plague modern cities, the writer argues, but the past offers valuable lessons for preventing such disasters in the future, including investing in “resilient infrastructure, … public plazas, domestic spaces for everyone, social mobility and leaders who treat the city’s workers with dignity.”

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age

A quest to explore some of the most spectacular ancient cities in human history―and figure out why people abandoned them

Covered With Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America by Nicole Eustace

In the winter of 1722, two white fur traders murdered Seneca hunter Sawantaeny after he refused their drunken, underhanded attempts to strike a deal. The ensuing furor, writes historian Nicole Eustace in Covered With Night , threatened to spark outright war between English colonists and the Indigenous inhabitants of the mid-Atlantic. Rather than enter into a prolonged, bloody battle, the Susquehanna River valley’s Native peoples forged an agreement, welcoming white traders back into their villages once Sawantaeny’s body had been metaphorically “covered,” or laid to rest in a “respectful, ritualized way,” as Eustace told Smithsonian magazine’ s Karin Wulf earlier this year.

“Native people believe that a crisis of murder makes a rupture in the community and that rupture needs to be repaired,” Eustace added. “They are not focused on vengeance; they are focused on repair, on rebuilding community. And that requires a variety of actions. They want emotional reconciliation. They want economic restitution.”

The months of negotiation that followed culminated in the Albany Treaty of 1722 , which provided both “ritual condolences and reparation payments” for Sawantaeny’s murder, according to Eustace. Little known today, the historian argues, the agreement underscores the differences between Native and colonial conceptions of justice. Whereas the former emphasized what would now be considered restorative justice (an approach that seeks to repair harm caused by a crime), the latter focused on harsh reprisal, meting out swift executions for suspects found guilty. “The Pennsylvania colonists never really say explicitly, ‘We’re following Native protocols. We’re accepting the precepts of Native justice,’” Eustace explained to Smithsonian . “But they do it because in practical terms they didn’t have a choice if they wanted to resolve the situation.”

Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America

An immersive tale of the killing of a Native American man and its far-reaching implications for the definition of justice from early America to today

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe

The Sackler family’s role in triggering the U.S. opioid epidemic attracted renewed attention this year with the release of “ Dopesick ,” a Hulu miniseries based on Beth Macy’s 2018 book of the same name , and Patrick Radden Keefe ’s award-winning Empire of Pain , which exhaustively examines the rise—and very public fall—of the drug-peddling American “dynasty.” 

Meticulously researched, the book traces its roots to the early 2010s, when the journalist was reporting on Mexican drug cartels for the New York Times magazine . As Keefe tells the London Times , he realized that 25 percent of the revenue generated by OxyContin, the most popular pill pushed by Sackler-owned Purdue Pharma, came from the black market. Despite this trend, the family was better known for its donations to leading art museums than its part in fueling opioid addiction. “There was a family that had made billions of dollars from the sale of a drug that had such a destructive legacy,” Keefe says, “yet hadn’t seemed touched by that legacy.” Infuriated, he began writing what would become Empire of Pain .

The resulting 560-page exposé draws on newly released court documents, interviews with more than 200 people and the author’s personal accounts of the Sacklers’ attempts to intimidate him into silence. As the New York Times notes in its review, the book “paint[s] a devastating portrait of a family consumed by greed and unwilling to take the slightest responsibility or show the least sympathy for what it wrought.” 

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

A grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin

Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America by Keisha N. Blain

Historian Keisha N. Blain derived the title of her latest book from a well-known quote by its subject, voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer : “We have a long fight and this fight is not mine alone, but you are not free whether you are white or Black, until I am free.” As Blain wrote for Smithsonian last year, Hamer, who grew up in the Jim Crow South in a family of sharecroppers , first learned about her right to vote in 1962, at the age of 44. After attempting to register to vote in Mississippi, she faced verbal and physical threats of violence—experiences that only strengthened her resolve.

Blain’s book is one of two new Hamer biographies released in 2021. The other, Walk With Me by historian Kate Clifford Larson , offers a more straightforward account of the activist’s life. Comparatively, Blain’s volume situates Hamer in the broader political context of the civil rights movement. Both titles represent a long-overdue celebration of a woman whose contributions to the fight for equal rights have historically been overshadowed by men like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America

Explores the Black activist’s ideas and political strategies, highlighting their relevance for tackling modern social issues including voter suppression, police violence, and economic inequality

Into the Forest: A Holocaust Story of Survival, Triumph, and Love by Rebecca Frankel

On April 30, 1942, 11-year-old Philip Lazowski found himself separated from his family during a Nazi selection in the Polish town of Zhetel. Realizing that the elderly, the infirm and unaccompanied children were being sent in one direction and families with work permits in the other, he tried to blend in with the children of a woman he recognized, only to hear her hiss , “Don’t stand next to us. You don’t belong in this group.” Looking around, Lazowski soon spotted another stranger and her daughters. Desperate, he pleaded with her to let him join them. After pausing momentarily, the woman— Miriam Rabinowitz —took his hand and said, “If the Nazis let me live with two children, they’ll let me live with three.”

All four survived the selection. From there, however, their paths temporarily diverged. Lazowski reunited with his family, remaining imprisoned in the Zhetel ghetto before fleeing into the nearby woods, where he remained hidden for the next two and a half years. Miriam, her husband Morris and their two children similarly sought refuge in a forest but did not encounter Lazowski again until after the war. (Lazowski later married one of the Rabinowitz daughters, Ruth, after running into Miriam at a 1953 wedding in Brooklyn—a “stroke of luck that … mirrors the random twists of fate that enabled the family to survive while so many others didn’t,” per Publishers Weekly .) 

As journalist Rebecca Frankel writes in Into the Forest , the Rabinowitzes and Lazowski were among the roughly 25,000 Jews who survived the war by hiding out in the woods of Eastern Europe. The majority of these individuals (about 15,000) joined the partisan movement , eking out a meager existence as ragtag bands of resistance fighters, but others, like the Rabinowitzes, formed makeshift family camps, “aiming not for revenge but survival,” according to the Forward . Frankel’s account of the family’s two-year sojourn in the woods captures the harsh realities of this lesser-known chapter in Holocaust history, detailing how forest refugees foraged for food (or stole from locals when supplies were scarce), dug underground shelters and remained constantly on the move in hopes of avoiding Nazi raids. Morris, who worked in the lumber business, used his pre-war connections and knowledge of the forest to help his family survive, avoiding the partisans “in the hope of keeping outside the fighting fray,” as Frankel writes for the New York Times . Today, she adds, the stories of those who escaped into the woods remain “so elusive” that some scholars have referred to them as “the margins of the Holocaust.”

Into the Forest: A Holocaust Story of Survival, Triumph, and Love

From a little-known chapter of Holocaust history, one family’s inspiring true story

The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship, and Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age by Amy Sohn

Though its title might suggest otherwise, The Man Who Hated Women focuses far more on the American women whose rights Anthony Comstock sought to suppress than the sexist government official himself. As novelist and columnist Amy Sohn explains in her narrative non-fiction debut, Comstock , a dry goods seller who moonlighted as a special agent to the U.S. Post Office and the secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, spent more than four decades hounding activists who advocated for women’s reproductive rights. In 1873, he lobbied Congress to pass the Comstock Act , which made it illegal to send “obscene, lewd or lascivious” material—including documents related to birth control and sexual health —through the mail; in his view, the author adds, “obscenity, which he called a ‘hydra-headed-monster,’ led to prostitution, illness, death, abortions and venereal disease.”

The Man Who Hated Women centers on eight women activists targeted by Comstock: among others, Victoria Claflin Woodhull, the first woman to run for president; anarchist and labor organizer Emma Goldman; Planned Parenthood founder and notorious eugenicist Margaret Sanger ; abortionist Ann “ Madam Restell ” Lohman; and homeopath Sarah Chase , who fought back against censorship by dubbing a birth control device the “Comstock Syringe.” Weaving together these women’s stories, Sohn identifies striking parallels between 19th- and 20th-century debates and contemporary threats to abortion rights. “Risking destitution, imprisonment and death,” writes the author in the book’s introduction, “[these activists] defined reproductive liberty as an American right, one as vital as those enshrined in the Constitution. … Without understanding [them], we cannot fight the assault on women’s bodies and souls that continues even today.”

The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship, and Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age

A narrative history of Anthony Comstock, anti-vice activist and U.S. Postal Inspector, and the remarkable women who opposed his war on women’s rights at the turn of the 20th century

African Europeans: An Untold History by Olivette Otele

In this sweeping chronicle , scholar Olivette Otele challenges white-centric narratives of European history by tracing African people’s presence on the continent from the 3rd century to the 21st. Featuring a rich cast of characters, including Renaissance duke Alessandro de’ Medici , 18th-century polymath Joseph Boulogne , and actress and artists’ muse Jeanne Duval , African Europeans artfully examines changing conceptions of race and how these ideas have shaped both real-world experiences and accounts of the past. 

“The term ‘African European’ is … a provocation for those who deny that one can have multiple identities and even citizenships, as well as those who claim that they do not ‘see color,’” writes Otele in the book’s introduction. “The aims of this volume are to understand connections across time and space, to debunk persistent myths, and to revive and celebrate the lives of African Europeans.”

African Europeans: An Untold History

A dazzling history of Africans in Europe, revealing their unacknowledged role in shaping the continent

The Eagles of Heart Mountain by Bradford Pearson

Life at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming, where some 14,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated between August 1942 and November 1945, was punctuated by harsh winters, inadequate medical care, and racist treatment by white staff and locals. A year or so after the camp’s opening, however, prisoners gained an unlikely source of hope: high school football. As journalist Bradford Pearson writes in The Eagles of Heart Mountain , the team—made up mainly of second-generation immigrants who’d never played the sport before—went undefeated in the 1943 season and lost just one game the year after that. 

Pearson juxtaposes the heartwarming tale of the underdog Eagles with details of how players resisted the draft. Reluctant to fight on behalf of a country that had ordered their detainment, several of the young men refused to enlist, leaving them vulnerable to (additional) imprisonment. “We are not being disloyal,” declared the Heart Mountain–based Fair Play Committee. “We are not evading the draft. We are all loyal Americans fighting for justice and democracy right here at home.”

The Eagles of Heart Mountain: A True Story of Football, Incarceration, and Resistance in World War II America

The impeccably researched, deeply moving, never-before-told tale about a World War II incarceration camp in Wyoming and its extraordinary high school football team

About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks by David Rooney

“[F]or thousands of years,” argues David Rooney in About Time , humans have “harnessed, politicized and weaponized” time, using clocks to “wield power, make money, govern citizens and control lives.” A former curator of timekeeping at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, home of Greenwich Mean Time , Rooney traces his fascination with horology to his childhood, when his parents ran a clockmaking and restoration business. Over a lifetime spent studying clocks, the scholar realized that the devices could be used as windows into civilization, revealing insights on “capitalism, the exchange of knowledge, the building of empires and the radical changes to our lives brought by industrialization.”

About Time centers on 12 clocks created over some 2,000 years, from a sundial at the Roman forum in 263 B.C.E. to a plutonium time-capsule clock buried in Osaka, Japan, in 1970. As the centuries progressed, timekeeping tools became increasingly accurate—a development that could “never [be] politically neutral,” notes the Washington Post in its review of the book. Instead, the standardization of time enabled capitalist endeavors like the opening and closing of financial markets and social control measures such as laws limiting when consumers could purchase alcohol. Overall, writes Rooney, his “personal, idiosyncratic and above all partial account” seeks to demonstrate that “monumental timekeepers mounted high up on towers or public buildings have been put there to keep us in order, in a world of violent disorder, … as far back as we care to look.” 

About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks

A captivating, surprising history of timekeeping and how it has shaped our world

America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s by Elizabeth Hinton

Between July 1964 and April 2001, almost 2,000 urban rebellions sparked by racially motivated police intimidation, harassment and violence broke out across the U.S. These “explosions of collective resistance to an unequal and violent order,” in Elizabeth Hinton ’s words , are often characterized as riots—a term the Yale historian rejects in favor of “rebellion.” Citing a rich trove of historical data, Hinton’s America on Fire   convincingly argues that Black rebellions occur in response to police violence rather than the other way around. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1960s “ War on Crime ,” for example, contributed to the growth of local police forces that “encroach[ed on] all aspects of Black social life, transforming typical youthful transgressions into fodder for police assaults on young Black people,” per the New Yorker .

Published almost exactly a year after George Floyd was killed in police custody, America on Fire deftly draws parallels between the violence that followed the assassinations of civil rights leaders in the 1960s and the 2020 protests. Only “extraordinary” acts of police violence, like the well-documented murder of Floyd, prompt such rebellions today: “[T]he daily violence and indignities that Black people experience in encounters with police go unaddressed,” notes the Washington Post in its review of the book. “In this sense, Hinton argues that the status quo has won. Ordinary police violence has become normalized, run-of-the-mill. We respond to only its most brutal forms.”

America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s

From one of our top historians, a groundbreaking story of policing and “riots” that shatters our understanding of the post–civil rights era

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Meilan Solly is Smithsonian magazine's associate digital editor, history.

The 10 Best Books About History and World Civilizations

If you buy something using our links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Thanks for your support!

History books are more than just learning materials. They're mirrors of a treasured past full of positive and negative events that show us how we got to where we are and what the future might bring.

Of course, history is far from simple. It's not just about what happened but also interpreting what happened. Two people may agree that something happened, but the context around that event and the meaning of that event may surely differ between them.

So, when it comes to understanding world history, it's just as important to know what happened as it is to trust the one who's telling you about it. As the saying goes, history is written by the victors.

Here are our favorite books that offer grounded looks into the most significant phases of world history, as well as the historical figures who made big impacts on the world. Their stories speak to every culture and nation, and we stand to learn a lot if we keep our minds open.

10. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

Authored by Peter Frankopan

First published in 2015

636 pages — 4.17 on Goodreads

The Silk Road, which spanned from the Balkans all the way to East Asia, is one of the best-known trading routes in world history. By connecting the known world together, it influenced the spread of culture from one end to the other—and the effects are still felt today.

Peter Frankopan's book dissects the influence that the Silk Road had on the world's nations and civilizations. Frankopan also links the trade route to the life cycle of history's most powerful empires, plus the rise of Christianity and Islam in the West.

9. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

Authored by Mary Beard

606 pages — 4.05 on Goodreads

Ancient Rome has long been a fascinating subject, not just for history lovers but also for pop culture to borrow from. But if you want a truly grounded account of Ancient Rome, check out Mary Beard's fascinating nonfiction book SPQR .

In SPQR —which stands for "Senatus Populus Que Romanus" and means "the Senate and the People of Rome"—Beard gives an intimate account of the turbulent history of Rome, starting all the way back from its roots as an Iron Age civilization.

The book sheds intricate details on the lifestyle of the typical Roman citizen, building up to several of the most significant milestones in Roman history. More of a historical journal than an encyclopedia, SPQR offers a fresh and intimate portrait of empirical Rome.

8. Headstrong: 52 Women Who Changed Science—And the World

Authored by Rachel Swaby

288 pages — 4.01 on Goodreads

For most of recorded history, female scientists—and female minds in general—have been overlooked, brushed aside, neglected, and forgotten. Women have traditionally been looked down upon and impeded.

But Rachel Swaby's Headstrong aims to correct that mistake by highlighting the impact, the influence, and the true-to-life stories of some of history's brightest female scientists.

She doesn't just cover the famous one—like computer innovator Ada Lovelace or British chemist Dorothy Hodgkin—but lesser-known scientists as well. In doing so, Headstrong sheds light on the women geniuses behind some of the most important innovations of the century.

7. Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom

Authored by Keisha N. Blain

First published in 2018

255 pages — 4.16 on Goodreads

Here's another history book that recognizes lesser-known figures, except this time it's the women behind the black nationalist movement.

Set the World on Fire profiles three significant icons: Mittie Maude Lena Gordon (who rallied for emigration to West Africa), Celia Jane Allen (who gathered rural black workers in Jim Crow-plagued Mississippi), and Amy Jacques Garvey (who campaigned for the Greater Liberia Bill).

Their stories are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to black nationalist activism, and historian Keisha N. Blain uses every resource to highlight their cause: equality and civility.

Authored by Ron Chernow

First published in 2017

1,074 pages — 4.48 on Goodreads

Ron Chernow is one of the most acclaimed names behind the most reliable biographies in bookstores. Did you know his book about Alexander Hamilton was the source for the blockbuster musical Hamilton ? But equally great is his biography about Ulysses S. Grant.

Going against pop history, Grant debunks the caricatured legacy of the Civil War general, which was frequently linked to his drunkenness, misfortunes, and misunderstood heroism.

Instead, Chernow grounds Grant as a gallant man who weathered the worst chapters of his life and used them as milestones to support far greater causes during the Civil War. As far as biographies of heroes go, Grant paints the whole picture and paints it well.

5. The Guns of August

Authored by Barbara W. Tuchman

First published in 1962

658 pages — 4.17 on Goodreads

The movements and hostilities that led to the First World War were complicated, to say the least. This Pulitzer Prize-winning book summarizes the conflicts of 19th and 20th century Europe, connecting them to the first month of World War I.

In broadening the scope of which nations and empires were involved in the war, author Barbara W. Tuchman brings a full account and vivid description of the first thirty days of the war.

Her points lead back to her thesis: bad diplomacy is what led to WWI. While other historians dispute it, it's hard to deny the grandeur of Tuchman's attention to detail towards this era of history.

4. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Authored by Yuval Noah Harari

First published in 2011

512 pages — 4.37 on Goodreads

As far as we know, humans— Homo sapiens —have been around for about 300,000 years. Exploring everything that happened during that time will forever be a continuous search for the truth.

But historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari takes a different approach to decoding the history of humanity. In Sapiens , he bases his findings on anthropological reasoning and argues that man's constant progress is defined by man's constant exploration of ideas.

This is a more intellectual read than most of the other books on this list, as Harari relates the evolution of humanity to prominent events in world history and changes in the global ecosystem.

By integrating science, philosophy, and history, Sapiens strengthens the notion of humanity's biological authority while also asking the ultimate question: where do we go from here?

3. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

Authored by Charles C. Mann

First published in 2005

563 pages — 4.04 on Goodreads

Picture the Americas before Christopher Columbus had set foot on the continent. For many, it's hard to imagine.

But Charles C. Mann's nonfiction book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus shows us the civilizations that thrived among the pre-Columbian Natives before colonialism took hold.

This is one of the best reads for a broader look at indigenous groups, courtesy of a more grounded approach to their cultures and interpretations of governance, science, and customs.

Charles C. Mann argues that Mesoamerican contributions are on the same level as those by Egyptian and Asian civilizations. An eye-opener towards early America, 1491 is a crucial piece of history.

2. The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome

Authored by Susan Wise Bauer

First published in 2007

896 pages — 4.11 on Goodreads

The title says it all when it comes to Susan Wise Bauer's groundbreaking book. It's a fascinating portrait of ancient history, particularly with its exploration of history's largest civilizations.

Bauer uses methods of "history from beneath"—like letters and literature—to expound the relationship between the rulers and the ruled. That angle determines the progress of several powerful civilizations, from Romans to Arabs, highlighting the origins of their customs and culture.

According to her, beneath the accomplishments of early societies is the more fundamental nature of human behavior, which is what truly brought history and civilization into motion.

1. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Authored by Jared Diamond

First published in 1997

498 pages — 4.04 on Goodreads

The books featured in this article mostly argue that human nature was behind the most significant changes in history and civilization.

But the Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel reasons that environmental and geographical elements brought the most significant changes to historical events and civilized societies.

Applying his expertise in biology, author (and ornithologist) Jared Diamond contends that societal advances are partly caused by natural phenomena. Indeed, he asserts that nature itself serves as the basis for power play between civilizations and races.

While it's contentious, Guns, Germs, and Steel is hard to ignore over its findings, proving that history and science are not poles apart.

30 Best Travel Books to Inspire The Wanderer in You

Written By: The Planet D

Inspiration

Updated On: January 7, 2024

The best way I know how to spark my wanderlust is to get inspiration from great travel books. My favorite travel books cover everything from a life changing experience to overcoming adversity. They make me laugh out loud and inspire me to explore the world. These books don’t focus on one theme they focus on many. So get your Kindle ready and start downloading today!

Table of Contents

Best Travel Books to Explore the World

In this article, we wanted to share some of the best travel books that made me laugh, made me cry, and inspired me to get out and travel around the world.

Disclosure: If you click the links below and make a purchase from Amazon, we do receive a referral commission at no extra cost to you.

1. Masked Rider by Neil Peart

Many people know him as a massively talented drummer from  Rush . But what they do not realize is that Neil Peart was not only one of the greatest drummers in the history of music , he was also an avid cyclist. Sadly, Peart died of cancer, but through his music and travelogue and travel books his genius lives on. (yes he has more than )

Masked Rider is an honest and undisguised account of his time cycling in West Africa. It’s a must read for anyone who wants to go on a great adventure. Neil Peart lets us see the man behind the rock star and he makes us realize that superstars are people too. Purchase Masked Rider – Neil Peart on Amazon

2. Finding Gobi by Dion Leonard

If you love dogs, this is one of the best adventure travel books you’ll read to make you smile. Ultramarathon runner Dion Leonard traveled to China with one thing on his mind; to finish on the podium of a 155-mile race through the Gobi desert.

Follow the story of Leonard, whose heart is warmed by the persistence of a stray dog that kept pace through heat and exhaustion for 70 miles. See how Leonard is transformed from a focused veteran to a man that gives up what little food he has in his pack to share with the stray dog that he named, Gobi. Buy Finding Gobi – Dion Leonard on Amazon.com to see what happens next

3. American Shaolin by Matthew Polly

A regular American guy, Matthew Polly recounts his time living, studying, and performing with the Shaolin monks in China. This is one bizarre and hilarious travel memoir about fulfilling your dreams. Follow along as Matthew drops out of Princeton to pursue his ambitions of transforming his scrawny physique into that of a kung fu master.

He tells tales of breaking into the secret world of Shaolin Kung Fu which has strange disciplines like “The Iron Crotch” and other various indestructible body parts. I seriously think this is also one of the funnest travel books to read out there. Check out American Shaolin – Matthew Polly today.

4. Crazy Rich Asians – Kevin Kwan

The movie took the world by storm and it is one of the few travel books that translates to screen beautifully. Peek behind the looking glass of the secretive billionaire families that have more money than Vladimir Putin.

Follow along as Rachel joins her boyfriend in Singapore on a summer holiday only to find out that her humble boyfriend is Asia’s most eligible bachelor and everyone (including his mother) is out to tear them apart.

This is one of the best travel books based in Asia depicting the unique culture of Singaore. Read Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan now.

5. White Tiger – Aravind Adiga

White Tiger tells of a dirty and unforgiving India, an India that doesn’t allow people to claw their way out of their Caste. It is now a movie on Netflix. I haven’t watched it yet but if it’s good you can be sure I’ll add it to my favorite travel movies.

This was one of those travel books that neither of us could put down and a book that we feel is a must read for everyone  traveling to India.   Those who have spent their time in an Ashram or driving around the country in an organized tour isolated from the truth won’t like it. But, like one review said, “This is the book that India Tourism doesn’t want you to read.” Get White Tiger by Aravind Adiga on Amazon.

6. The Beach by Alex Garland

Let me set one thing straight, I hated the movie The Beach, but I loved the book by Alex Garland. The Beach captures what travel was like in Thailand way back in the 1990s. (trust me, we were there). This is one of the first travel books we read that really brought us back. toa place we had been to.

The rooms in Thai guesthouses were disgusting, and the streets were filled with backpackers seeking adventure while escaping the world drinking cheap beer. There were still undiscovered coves and beaches that nobody had heard of, and there were probably several drug kingpins running the land.

Visiting Thailand for the first time is still a great adventure and this is a must read anyone going to the land of Smiles for the very first time! The Beach by Alex Garland is available on Amazon.

7. In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson is the king of writing travel books that make you laugh our loud. Anything by Bill Bryson is a winner, but my personal favorite memoir by Bryson is “In a Sunburned Country”. This was the first book I read by Bryson and it inspired me to read them all! I laughed out loud.

Written at a time when the world was still getting to know Australia, it shows the quirkiness of the island country and makes you want to book a ticket to see it for yourself. If you pick up any book by Bill Bryson, you won’t be sorry but, In a Sunburned Country is our favorite.

Go Around the World with Bill Bryson:

• A Walk in the Woods – Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail spanning the Eastern Coast.
• A Stranger to Myself – Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away
• The Best American Travel Writing
• The Road to Little Dribbling – An American in Britain

8. Dave Barry Does Japan

He may be old school when it comes to mentioning travel books and authors, but Dave Barry is hilarious. It was Dave Barry who sparked my love for travel writing and how powerful, funny, and inspiring it could be.

I never thought I’d become a travel writer, but I loved reading about his escapades around the world. He explains Japanese traditions through humor and experiences at karaoke bars, geisha encounters, kabuki theatre, and confusing comedy clubs. Japan is still very confusing even today so it is worth a read. Check out Dave Barry Does Japan and have a great laugh today.

9. Love Africa by Jeffrey Gettleman

Love Africa tells the story of Jeffry Gettleman the East Africa bureau chief for the New York Times. It begins with his first trip to Africa when he volunteered and fell in love with the continent.

But he kept being called back to the United States to his other love, his girlfriend Courtenay who is a criminal defense lawyer. Follow along as he navigates his career as a journalist, to his love for Africa and his true love relationship with Courtenay. We know how Africa can tug at your heart.

Can you have it all? Read and follow along on this travel memoir through Africa, because we’re not giving it away. Buy Love Africa by Jeffrey Gettleman on Amazon.

10. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

It’s an oldie but a goodie. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho is the story of a shepherd boy named Santiago who sells his flock and purchases a ticket to Tangier, where he is robbed and must work at a shop to find his way home.

At the heart of the book lies Santiago who embarks on a quest to find his true purpose in life. As he encounters a series of characters and navigates the challenges of the journey, Santiago learns valuable lessons about faith and perseverance.

“The Alchemist” is a book that invites readers to reflect on their own lives and aspirations. Coelho’s emphasis on listening to one’s heart, embracing the unknown, and overcoming fear resonate deeply, inspiring readers to question their own paths and pursue their personal legends with courage and determination.

He ends up taking a great adventure across the Sahara and after all his adventures, discovers his fortune right back where he started. I read this book before we started traveling full time and it put me in the mood to wander. And to appreciate life.

I think The Alchemist was the catalyst for my dream of becoming a travel writer and taking the leap to explore the world. This book taught me that you don’t need to go far to discover the beauty in life. Buy the Alchemist on Amazon

11. A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah

This no-holds-barred autobiography of a child soldier, Ishmael Beah, is gripping.  A Long Way Gone tells how an innocent child can be forced into savage warfare in Sierra Leone. It may not belong in your typical travel books listing, but it is something that people should read and know about.

Having lost everything including his family, his home, and his soul, Ishmael tells of his journey to evade the military. For three years he hid in the jungle and half-starved to death. It recounts the fear and despair he felt each day until he was finally captured by the government army.

Hopped up on drugs, he was forced to commit unthinkable acts. This is a story of going to hell and back, living a life of revenge and violence. He was rescued by UNICEF but it was a long and painful rehabilitation. Read A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah

12. The Bang Bang Club – Greg Marinovich & Jaoa Silva

Set in Apartheid-Era South Africa, the  Bang Bang Club  is a true account telling the tale of the four photojournalists that dared to enter the townships and document history as it was happening.

It was written by two surviving journalists Greg Marinovich & Jaoa Silva Heartbreaking and shocking, the Bang Bang Club doesn’t hold back when telling of the brutality of that time.

The photographers had to come to terms with their own demons and what they witnessed day in and day out as war correspondence reporters. Their photos made history and set new standards, earning a Pulitzer Prize for two of the photographers. Get Your Copy of The Bang Bang Club – Greg Marinovich & Jaoa Silva

13. The Girl in the Picture – Vietnam

During the Vietnam War, photographer Nick Ut captured the shocking photo of children running from a napalm blast. Kim Phuc was the center of that photograph, with her naked body covered in severe burns. It became known as “the photo of the century” winning the Pulitzer Prize

In her own words, Kim tells her story of what happened to “The Girl in the Picture” Read the fascinating tale as she journeys from Vietnam eventually landing in Canada where she faced many hardships along the way. This book not only showed me what it was like for Phuc, but taught me about communism in Vietnam and what it took to break away. The Girl in the Picture – Vietnam

14. Touching the Void – Joe Simpson

Joe Simpson recalls his harrowing climb of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes back in 1985 with Simon Yates. Disaster struck after their summit when Joe fell into a crevasse and broke his leg (very badly).

We love adventure travel, but this is an entirely new level. The book stands the test of time as Joe recalls the three days he spent trying to get down the mountain after a near fatal fall and what he had to endure along the say. It was also  made into a movie  in 2003. Touching the Void – Joe Simpson

15. Into Thin Air – Jon Krakauer

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer is a gripping and harrowing firsthand account of the tragic 1996 Mount Everest disaster. As an acclaimed travel writer and mountaineer, Krakauer brings his expertise and storytelling prowess to this unforgettable true story that resonates with readers long after the final page.

Krakauer’s ability to convey the physical and emotional challenges faced by climbers on the world’s highest peak is unparalleled. I couldn’t put this book down. Krakauer captures the essence of the mountaineering experience, immersing readers in the awe-inspiring beauty and perilous nature of Everest that inspired us to visit Everest Base Camp.

Krakauer candidly reflects on his own role and decisions during the ill-fated expedition, providing a raw and introspective narrative that adds depth and authenticity to the book. His vulnerability and willingness to share the emotional toll of the tragedy make the story even more compelling.

We’ve been to  Mount Everest Base Camp  and it was exciting to read about a place that we’ve been to and retrace steps through Namche Bazaar, the Tengboche Monks, and the Sherpa monuments to those who have fallen. Into Thin Air – Jon Krakauer

Into the Wild by John Krakauer

We go directly to another John Krakauer. As a travel writer, Krakauer goes beyond mere adventure storytelling and has a knack for delving into the complexities of human nature and Into the Wild certainly does that.

Into the Wild” by Jon Krakauer is a captivating and introspective exploration of the true story of Christopher McCandless, a young man who abandoned civilization to embark on a solitary adventure in the Alaskan wilderness. It begins with a typical road trip across the country and then takes a turn.

Through interviews, personal anecdotes, and McCandless’s own writings, Krakauer pieces together the motivations, struggles, and ideals that led him to seek solace and freedom in the untamed wilderness.examining his desire for self-discovery, his rejection of societal norms, and his yearning for a simpler existence. Krakauer offers insights into the allure of the wild and the inner turmoil of a young man searching for meaning and transcendence.

The book delves into the complexities of McCandless’s character, and Krakauer’s skillful storytelling and introspective analysis allow readers to appreciate the complexities of his subject, even if they do not completely align with McCandless’s actions. Read it now.

16. Dark Star Safari – Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux is one of the Greatest modern travel writers of our time. And he has written many classics such as Mosquito Coast and the Great Railway Bazaar, but our favorite travel book by Paul Theroux is Dark Star Safari.

Dave and I started our travel adventures cycling from Cairo to Cape Town and Dark Star Safari takes Theroux overland as he revisits the continent but he was on a road trip (not bicycle). This book took us back to Africa and brought back all the feelings we had – the good, bad, the ugly, and the depressing parts that we forget.

Through his vivid account, sharp wit, and introspective reflections he brings to life the people, places, and complexities he encounters along the way from Cairo to Cap Town. From bustling cities to remote villages, readers are transported to the heart of Africa, experiencing the triumphs, hardships, beauty and every day life that define the continent.

What we like about Dark Star Safar, is how he shows the less glamorous aspects of travel. He confronts the realities of poverty, political instability, and cultural clashes, providing a nuanced and balanced perspective of Africa. Through his encounters with locals, aid workers, and fellow travelers, he unveils the complexities and contradictions that exist within each country and challenges common stereotypes. See our Cairo to Cape Town adventures at It All Began in Egypt: Cycling a Continent

Get Dark Star Safari – Paul Theroux on Amazon

17. Wild – From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed

Adventure travel can be transformational. When taking on a challenge, it is an emotional roller coaster. I’ve definitely been there with negative and productive thoughts and regrets. But as at the end of any grand adventure, the struggle can be healing and you can come out triumphant.

One of the most successful travel books (it always is when turned into a movie right?) focuses on the journey of the author along the Pacific Crest Trail while she navigates the physical and emotional challenges of hiking over a thousand miles in search of healing and self-discovery.

At the heart of the book lies Strayed’s emotional and psychological journey. As she grapples with grief, loss, and personal demons, she confronts her own vulnerabilities and gradually finds strength and resilience. Her candid exploration and raw honesty of her past mistakes, relationships, and the complexities of human nature is both relatable and inspiring.

Follow along as Cheryl Strayed faces her demons and struggles her way along the way. You can purchase Wild – Lost and Found on The Pacific Crest Trail. On Amazon here.

18. A Woman Alone: Travel Tales from Around the Globe

A Woman Alone: Travel Tales from Around the Globe is an anthology that celebrates the spirit of solo female travel. Edited by Faith Conlon, Ingrid Emerick, and Christina Henry de Tessan, this collection of personal narratives showcases the empowering and transformative experiences of women who have ventured out into the world on their own.

Solo female travelers will love this travel book. The book features a diverse range of stories from women of various backgrounds and destinations, offering a mosaic of perspectives and travel experiences. From exploring bustling cities to traversing remote landscapes, readers are treated to a rich tapestry of cultures, encounters, and adventures.

The anthology captures the essence of travel, going beyond mere descriptions of destinations to delve into the transformative power of exploration. A Woman Alone: Travel Tales from Around the Globe is an empowering and inspirational read for both seasoned travelers and those dreaming of embarking on their first solo adventure.

Get it on Amazon

19. 1,000 Places to See Before You Die by Patricia Schultz

1,000 Places to See Before You Die  is the original brainchild of the talented and wonderful Patricia Schultz. If you have a serious case of wanderlust to travel around the world, buy this travel book by Patricia Schultz. This travel book makes for a great gift!

Many travelers are always looking for inspiration and there is an endless supply here. I’ve taken my Sharpie Marker and gone through all the destinations around the globe that she recommends. 1,000 Places to See Before You Die is the world’s best selling travel book. I wish I had thought of this idea. If you are a collector of travel books, you need to have this in your library.

20. Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

I read Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert while traveling through India, so it certainly reminds me of my travels there. It is the real life story of Elizabeth Gilbert finding herself after divorce.

I didn’t identify with India (pray) part of the book since I was there at the time, but I could definitely get on board with eating through Italy and finding love in Bali. Many travelers love following in the footsteps of Eat Pray Love and why not? Who doesn’t want to run away from it all, find themselves, fall in love and write a book about it?

21. Grand Adventures by Alastair Humphreys

Grand Adventures is written by National Geographic Adventurer of the Year Alastair Humphreys. We first heard of Alastair while he was cycling around the world and were inspired so much by him, we followed his bike peddles to cycling Africa. This book round up the world’s most grand adventures to inspire you to try your own. (We make an appearance or two from one of our adventures around the globe as well.)

22. Concierge Confidential by Michael Fazio

Concierge Confidential by Michael Fazio gives the inside scoop from behind the scenes of the rich and famous. He was New York’s top concierge and he shares stories and secrets from the madness of catering to the elite. From the ridiculous demands to having to get people in to anywhere possible, it’s an at times hilarious read.

I wouldn’t want his job for the world, but it is fun to take a peek inside the secret life of a concierge. One of the more unconventional travel books since it’s from the perspective of the Concierge getting travelers their every whim, it still transports you to another place.

23. Ontario Escapes by Jim Buyers

Ontario Escapes is written by Veteran journalist and top travel writer in Canada, Jim Byers. He shares his personal experiences and tips for traveling around Ontario Canada.

As a native Ontario resident, I found so many hidden gems in this book offering great Ontario travel tips and ideas. I love Jim’s writing style as he shares practical information with inspiring personal stories and recommendations.

24. Ultimate Journeys for Two by Mike and Anne Howard

Ultimate Journeys for Two was written by our friends Mike and Anne Howards Mike who are currently on the world’s longest honeymoon. And you can find us there too talking about Greenland travel!

This travel book is more of an account of a bunch of couples giving advice and snippits about a place. Its more of a travel reference giving people travel ideas to inspire couples to go out and see the world and have a great adventure. There are ideas for couples to travel on every continent!

25. How to Travel the World on $50 a Day – Matt Kepnes

How to Travel the World on $50 a Day by Matt Kepnes shares money-saving tips on transportation, food, beverages, accommodation, and airline tickets, it’s the how-to guide for twenty-something budget travelers. Nomadic Matt has parlayed his highly successful travel blog into a best selling travel book on the New York Times’ best sellers list.

While I’m not sure if you really can travel for $50 a day in today’s world, it is still a good reference for budget travel and budget tips and advice.

26. Lonely Planet’s Best in Travel 2023

If you are looking for good travel guide books while traveling we recommend Lonely Planet. It is still our go-to travel book to help plan our adventures.

Lonely Planet was once often referenced as “The Bible of Travel.” Dave and I never booked a trip without buying a lonely planet country guide. While travel blogs have taken away a lot of travel guide book revenue, the Lonely Planet is still highly regarded. And you can never Lonely Planet’s Best in Travel series. Lonely Planet’s Best in Travel 2023 follows the formula of the previous Best in Travel series.

Published annually, Lonely Planet’s Best in Travel showcases the top destinations, experiences, and trends around the world, curated by travel experts. What are the top destinations for 2023? You’ll have to purchase it to find out.

Here’s a cool fact, we named The Planet D after The Lonely Planet in 2007. We were so inspired by the Lonely Planet travel books that when trying to think of a name for our travel blog, we simply took off the lonely, and added a “D” Plus, the Lonely Planet is what inspired me to get into travel writing. It was my dream to write for them one day.

Get the Lonely Planet Best of 2023 on Amazon Here

27. The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain

Mark Twain’s “Innocents Abroad” takes readers on a delightful through Europe and the Holy Land aboard his voyage in a retired Civil War ship (the USS Quaker City). Why do we love it? Well, this travelogue, first published in 1869, offers a unique perspective on the experiences of American tourists during the mid-19th century.

Twain’s witty and satirical writing style shines throughout the book, making it an enjoyable and entertaining read. While the book is primarily a humorous account of his journey, it also delves into deeper themes and critiques of society. Twain reflects on the idiosyncrasies of human nature, the follies of tourism, and the stark contrasts between cultures.

It is worth noting that Innocents Abroad can be a dense read at times, particularly for readers who are not familiar with the historical context or the locations mentioned. Twain occasionally includes lengthy digressions and references to classical literature, which might require additional effort from the reader to fully appreciate. Get it on Amazon

28. Right Turn at Machu Picchu by Mark Adams

Right Turn at Machu Picchu is a travel memoir by Mark Adams that weaves together history, archaeology, and personal discovery as Adams retraces the footsteps of Hiram Bingham III, the explorer who rediscovered the ancient Inca citadel of Machu Picchu.

Blending his own travel experiences and encounters with informative and fascinating insights into the history and culture of the Incas creates an infectious story where readers will find themselves eagerly turning the pages to uncover the secrets of Machu Picchu.

One of the book’s strengths lies in Adams’ ability to convey the awe-inspiring beauty and mystique of the Peruvian landscape. With a modern travel writing tone, Adams transports readers through the rugged terrain, lush jungles, and awe-inspiring ruins that make up the region surrounding Machu Picchu.

It even provides a wealth of historical and archaeological information, offering a deeper understanding of the site’s significance. See reviews and purchase it on Amazon

29. This Contested Land: The Storied Past and Uncertain Future of America’s National Monuments by McKenzie Long

A new addition to our best travel books article is This Contested Land: by Mckenzie Long delves into the history and complex issues surrounding America’s national monuments. (Shall we talk about Mount Rushmore anyone?)

Long sheds light on America’s national monuments including their creation, significance, and the ongoing debates surrounding their management. Through modern travel writing, Long explores the intertwined narratives of nature conservation, cultural preservation, and the conflicting interests that have shaped these sites.

This Contested Land does not shy away from exploring the controversies and conflicts surrounding national monuments. Long examines the various stakeholders involved, including local communities, indigenous groups, environmentalists, and commercial interests. By presenting multiple perspectives, the book encourages readers to contemplate the intricate balance between preservation, public access, and economic development.

This Contested Land serves as a valuable resource for anyone interested in America’s national monuments and the broader debates surrounding land conservation and cultural heritage. Check it out

30. In The Kingdom of Men by Kim Barnes

Kim Barnes takes readers on a mesmerizing journey into the heart of Arabia with her novel, “In The Kingdom of Men.” Set in 1960s Saudi Arabia, Barnes’ paints vivid prose of the desert landscape, transporting readers to a world of contrasts and contradictions in the Middle East. From the vast expanses of sand dunes to the opulent palaces and bustling markets, the setting becomes as much a character as the individuals who navigate its complexities.

The protagonist, Gin McPhee, a young American woman thrown into the unfamiliar Saudi Arabian culture, brings a fresh perspective to the narrative. As she grapples with the oppressive societal norms and her own desires for independence, readers are drawn into her struggle and resilience.

Barnes skillfully explores the clash between tradition and modernity, particularly through the lens of gender dynamics and the stark divide between the Western expatriates and the local Saudi community of the Middle East. She delves into the intricate web of power, politics, and cultural tensions, illuminating the challenges faced by those who seek to bridge these divides. Get it on Amazon

So have these travel books inspired you to go around the globe? What is the best travel adventure you’ve ever read? If you have other travel books to share, leave them in the comments below, we are always looking for good reads.

Read Next: 

• Best Travel Movies to Inspire Wanderlust 
• Best Travel Tips from 20 Years of Traveling
• Best Travel Songs to Rock the Long Drive
• 48 Best Travel Movies to Inspire Wanderlust
• 40 Best Gifts for Travelers That they will love
• 20 Best Motorcycle Movies and TV Shows To Inspire Wanderlust

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About The Planet D

Dave Bouskill and Debra Corbeil are the owners and founders of The Planet D. After traveling to 115 countries, on all 7 continents over the past 13 years they have become one of the foremost experts in travel. Being recognized as top travel bloggers and influencers by the likes of Forbes Magazine , the Society of American Travel Writers and USA Today has allowed them to become leaders in their field.

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65 thoughts on “30 Best Travel Books to Inspire The Wanderer in You”

Doing great job man… Keep it up.

Wonderful list. This is what I was searching for. Thanks for doing the hard research for me.

Awesome list. Thanks for sharing. It’s really very useful.

Thanks for sharing!

These are very interesting books about travel, I had the opportunity to read some of them. very nice

I can’t wait to read more of these books! Reading has always been one way that I keep my wanderlust alive and well.

I was just searching for some good books which can take me into the world of wanderlust. As expected, you are on the internet with your awesome experience. I would love to read all of them. The Alchemist I have done and I am approaching other ones from now onwards. Thanks for sharing this post.

Very useful thing for those who like traveling. Thanks for sharing this with us,

Love those books… thanks for sharing Regards! Thank You!

Michael Palin’s Pole to Pole and Levison Woods Walking the Himalayas!

The only book in this list that I have read (partly) is Eat Pray Love but I also didn’t love it! I was actually in Bali when I started it and it just didn’t grab me, but I’ll definitely be trying out some others on this list! A good book on holiday can do wonders!

I hope to get my hands on Eat, Pray, Love soon. It must be a great read coz it’s on every travel books list.

Wonderful collection. I was in deep search. Thanks a lot to write about these books.

Thanks, Actually I am searching these collection from so many times. Great !!

Thanks for sharing. I was actually not aware about Michael Crichton’s book. Great list of books, I better start reading.

Lot’s of new books for me to add to my list! Thank you! I loved In A Sunburned Country, I consider it one of my favourite travel books and it definitely encouraged me to travel to Australia where I am now!

Thanks, guys some great books there. Think I need to get my hands on Dave does Japan. I am hoping to visit next year.

My all time favourite travel book that I never seen included on any lists is called WorldWalk by Steven Newman. In his early 20s, over a period of 4 years, Steven walked around the world relying on the kindness of strangers. This was the mid-1980s well before the time of internet and mobile phones being common place. His book is inspirational and entertaining and eye-opening all at once. I can’t recommend it enough.

it is very helpful for me like a traveler

An amazing list of books. I watched the film Eat Pray Love (starring Julia Roberts, maybe) but never took the time to read the book. THis list inspired me.

I think one books may be worth adding is Vagabonding.

I just want to say “wow” you have an amazing collection of books.

I was looking for a list like this! I just finished reading a series of books for foodies and Eat Pray Love was one of them. Thanks for sharing yours! Concierge Confidential seems like an interesting read.

thanks for sharing

i have planning to travel 2or3 places.i read this article.it is very helpful it provide great ideas.amazing article thanks for sharing.

Great recommendations! Some of it are already on my list. I just pick some great additions on my list. Thanks!

I think i watched the movie American Shaolin like 20 years ago. I didn’t know it was from a book. Gonna check it for sure. Thanks for great post.

I really love “Into Thin Air” by Jon Krakauer as well as his other book “Into the Wild”, The book and Sean Penn movie are amazing. I also love anything by Bill Bryson with my favorite being “A Walk in the Woods”

For something hot off the press, check out Oblivious; the story of a ride through Africa on a Royal Enfield. Lost teeth, hitchhiking on iron ore trains in the Sahara, romance… Check it out: obliviousthebook.com

Thank you for this! I’ve been into Kerouac lately because I love (and love to hate) his frantic writing style but I needed some other material =)

Hey Awesome List of books, I read eat pray love that is totally awesome and every traveler must read. Now I am going to add The Alchemist and American Shaolin in my bucket list.

Nice post! thanks for sharing.

I was searching for best travel books ad I found this. I have only Paulo Coelho from this list and i am definitely going to get myself a few. Thanks for the wonderful list. Really useful.

This is a great list – most of these I’ve not read so my reading list has just grown! A Long Way Gone is one book, though, that has been on my shelf for years – I’m a bit afraid to read it….

(I don’t admit this too loudly, but I couldn’t stand Eat Pray Love …)

Which is your favorite?? Obviously not Eat Pray Love! lol

The alchemist from the Paulo Coelho is very good book….i´m brazilian and like Paulo Coelho

Whenever I enter a bookstore, I always look for books pertaining travel, whether they are memoirs or a compilation of essays. I also made a post about these books that I have in my shelf. I can spot three of them here in your list. I’m interested in the other books you have cited here and I hope to get my own copies.

I am so happy to read this blog about 21 travel book. it is so much interesting and helpful for every person of the world who travel form one place to another. Canada is consider most visited place in the world. So Hamilton Airport Limo service is well known for Ground transportation medium to or from airport.

This is a great list… there’s also a lot of great poetry (Heights of Machu Picchu- Neruda) and Siddhartha by Herman Hesse really had me thinking Southeast Asia big time! Great post, guys!

I love to read travel books. This is a very resourceful list. I have read some of the books from this list. Very inspiring post. Loved it:)

This post has defiantly inspired me to get reading! please take the time to check out my travel blog: earthsmagicalplaces.com

All of these traveling books look amazing, especially if you’re on a long journey or waiting for your ride and need to kill time! Thank you for sharing these.

Awesome list, thanks for sharing with us

Many read and many added to the list. I’m neither a fan of books that paint a pretty picture of a country nor of the ones that put down a country altogether. But I still read them because there is no such thing as bad book 😉 We all learn a thing or two from a book anyway 🙂

I’m ashamed to admit that, of these, I’ve only read The Alchemist – although White Tiger is sitting waiting patiently on my bookshelf.

I do like to read books about / set in places I’m going to travel to, though. One of the best examples was before I went to Kansas last summer, I read all of the Little House on the Prairie books, and it actually really opened up the history of the area for me, and helped me to understand the formation of the state, and why it looks & is the way it is.

I’m currently reading Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel, and it’s really making me think about how I write about my own travels, and how I tie together my travel blogging with my other writing (poetry & fiction).

All of Bill Bryson’s travel books make me want to just get off the couch and just go (and record my travels with dry wit and sarcasm), but aside from Bryson’s Road to Little Dribbling, I think my other favorite travel read of the last year was Mo Willems’ You Can Never Find a Rickshaw When it Monsoons: The World on One Cartoon a Day. Not only does one cartoon a day actually create a bizarrely interesting read, but it makes you start noticing the little moments that make your day. I also enjoyed Storybook Travels by Colleen Dunn Bates and Susan La Tempa. It’s a great book for parents traveling with children!

Awesome list, I will definitely be picking up a few of those, and read some of them again. Thank you Dave and Deb 🙂

Ha! I loved The Beach, the movie! Haven’t read the book but maybe I’ll put it on my list. 🙂 I did stopped reading Eat, Pray, Love in the India chapter but I went back to read it a second time and I’m glad I did. Her book, Big Magic, is really great for aspiring creatives so I would recommend that. 🙂

Interesting. I should maybe read Eat Pray Love again. The India chapter might be better for me since I’m no longer in India. Being removed from the location might put her writing into a different perspective

Great recommendations! I can’t wait to check a few of these titles out!

Kate | http://www.petiteadventures.org/

I’m saving this post in Bloglovin’ for as a future shopping reference, haha. I’ve gone through all my books and need more reading material. Thanks so much for sharing! I own and have already read Nomadic Matt’s book. It was super helpful!

Oh lordy my stack of books that I want to read is already sizable but I can see I’m going to add a few more to it….you have some great recommendations here. 🙂 .-= Trisha´s last blog .. PR-Blogger Relations Manifesto =-.

I agree – I loved White Tiger and couldn’t put it down. I read about five or six of the “must reads” that were popular for India travelers at the time and White Tiger and Shantaram were tops!

I have to read Shantaram. I can’t believe I hadn’t heard of it before writing this post. That is what I love about posts like this, you can learn so much from other people.

White Tiger by Aravind Adiga is really cool and also Travels by Michael Crichton…great list D&D! .-= agentcikay´s last blog ..Hokkien Mee and its Cult status =-.

Thanks. I am glad that someone else has read travels. When we tell people that Michael Chricton had a travel book they think we are mistaken. But it is very good.

Hahaha, I am laughing because the two books I can’t stand about India are The White Tiger and Shantaram — and both are mentioned here, in your post and in the comments. I have read a lot of books about India and I think there are far better books, more balanced, more insightful, more honest. I find these two blow a lot of hot air.

I think there is a kind of reactionary response to the “shining” India of economists or the “magical” India of travel writers and spiritual seekers. In fact, India — like life — is all of these things. Magical, poor, spiritual, dirty, friendly, nerve-wracking. A lot depends on your perspective, attitude and perception.

I have said before that India is like the cave that Yoda sends Luke into. When Luke asks, “What will I find there?” Yoda answers, “Only what you bring in with you.”

Mariellen .-= Mariellen Ward´s last blog ..Photo of the Week- Naga Sadhu =-.

Well, we will agree to disagree on this subject. We enjoyed many parts of India and made friends with many wonderful people, but a book that talks about the negatives of any country is important. That is how change is made. The poor need a voice and White Tiger gives them one in a very entertaining way to let people know their side of the story. I would love to know the books that are more balanced and insightful, it would be great if you could list a couple of recommendations and I will check them out. And your Star Wars quote (while very profound) has nothing to do with the book and the point we are making. White Tiger is about the people that are living in India, not about what a tourist is supposed to get out of their spiritual journey to India. Thanks for your comment Mariellen, I know that you love India and this recommendation isn’t meant to offend people that do, it is just a book that we felt hit the nail on the head of a lot of what we saw and read in the papers while we were there.

I’m glad you replied to this Dave, the post made me feel stupid and ignorant when I first read it, but then I thought about it more and my point still stands – I read the book and it made me want to go to India. I will stand with the agreement to disagree – Shantaram is a work of fiction, which is a story with hints of lives and attitudes in India, but through extreme views. It’s like saying you’d never go to Virginia because of Patricia Cornwell’s books. If I wanted earnest travel writing with a true anthropological view, I’d have gone to the travel writing or the history section. Perhaps it’s even more impressive that a work of fiction can open your mind to a country. I get a better view of what it’s really like from Indian friends, but I’m also a literature fan and have many influences in my travel life.

I’m currently struggling through Open Veins of Latin America, which is a socio-historic view of the region, before travelling out to Costa Rica later this year. It’s very worthy and I would really like to understand more of the politics, history and culture before I go but I’m highly unlikely to finish it as history presented in fact is rarely inspirational and certainly more difficult to absorb. My partner bought me Costa Rica: A Traveller’s Literary Companion, which is a series of local, translated short stories and folklore. I’ve whizzed through it because it was enjoyable and accessible – far more inspiring than the worthier tome that will give me a ‘better’ view.

Sorry to rant – apparently I feel quite strongly about this!

Thanks for the comment and don’t be sorry at all. That is what we love about blogging, it encourages discussion. I think that your point is bang on. Books of extremes can make me want to go the a country even more. The Bang Bang Club is very unforgiving and yet, I think that it inspires people to go to South Africa. I read it while I was there and loved it even though it didn’t portray the country is a perfect light. I guess, a lot of the books we mentioned don’t paint a pretty picture of any country, but they all have inspired us to explore them more. And you are right, this is a book of fiction and it is impressive that a book can open your mind to a country and evoke such strong feelings on either side of the coin. That makes for great writing I think, when people feel passionate about it either way…absolutely loving it, or genuinely hating it.

Shantaram is also a very inspiring picture of India. Bittersweet, laugh out loud, exciting book. I’d never wanted to visit before reading this, now it’s definitely on my list.

Laura, I will definitely have to check out Shantaram thanks for the recommendation.

Oops, I replied to Trisha on the wrong post, that is supposed to be on Celebrities that inspire travel post. Taking it off now, but didn’t want you to think that I was a crazy person and going off on a tangent regarding celebrities:) Sorry Laura.

I must say it did confuse me!

Haha, sorry about that. If you didn’t reply back, I would have never known and we would have had an odd message on our books post about celebrities. 🙂

100 Must-Read World War II Books

Rebecca Hussey

Rebecca holds a PhD in English and is a professor at Norwalk Community College in Connecticut. She teaches courses in composition, literature, and the arts. When she’s not reading or grading papers, she’s hanging out with her husband and son and/or riding her bike and/or buying books. She can't get enough of reading and writing about books, so she writes the bookish newsletter "Reading Indie," focusing on small press books and translations. Newsletter: Reading Indie Twitter: @ofbooksandbikes

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In search of World War II books, by any chance? If so, you’ve come to the right place.

Below, I’ve compiled a list of fiction, YA, memoir, biography, and history for you to check out. This is by no means a comprehensive list. The number of World War II books available is vast . People love to read about one of the worst events in history. In a way, this makes no sense—the list below makes for some depressing reading. But in another way, the list contains reading that is compelling and essential: we need to know our history now, if ever.

So take a look at the list below and let me know in the comments if your favorite World War II book didn’t make the cut!

Descriptions come from publisher copy on Goodreads.

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

“[ All the Light We Cannot See is] about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. “

Atonement by Ian McEwan

“ On a hot summer day in 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses a moment’s flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant and Cecilia’s childhood friend. But Briony’s incomplete grasp of adult motives—together with her precocious literary gifts—brings about a crime that will change all their lives. “

Blackout by Connie Willis

“ Oxford in 2060 is a chaotic place, with scores of time-traveling historians being sent into the past. Michael Davies is prepping to go to Pearl Harbor. Merope Ward is coping with a bunch of bratty 1940 evacuees and trying to talk her thesis adviser into letting her go to VE-Day.”

Das Boot by Lothar-Günther Buchheim, Translated by Denver Lindley

“ In autumn 1941, a German U-boat commander and his crew set out on yet another hazardous patrol in the Battle of the Atlantic. Over the coming weeks they brave the ocean’s stormy waters and seek out British supply ships to destroy. But their targets travel in well-guarded convoys. When contact finally occurs, the hunter quickly becomes the hunted .”

The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk

“ Herman Wouk’s boldly dramatic, brilliantly entertaining novel of life-and mutiny-on a Navy warship in the Pacific theater was immediately embraced, upon its original publication in 1951, as one of the first serious works of American fiction to grapple with the moral complexities and the human consequences of World War II. “

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

“ Set in the closing months of World War II in an American bomber squadron off the coast of Italy, Catch-22 is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he has never even met keep trying to kill him. “

China Dolls by Lisa See

“[ Grace, Helen, and Ruby ] become fast friends, relying on one another through unexpected challenges and shifting fortunes. When their dark secrets are exposed and the invisible thread of fate binds them even tighter, they find the strength and resilience to reach for their dreams. But after the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, paranoia and suspicion threaten to destroy their lives, and a shocking act of betrayal changes everything. “

The City of Thieves by David Benioff

“ During the Nazis’ brutal siege of Leningrad, Lev Beniov is arrested for looting and thrown into the same cell as a handsome deserter named Kolya. Instead of being executed, Lev and Kolya are given a shot at saving their own lives by complying with an outrageous directive.”

Code Talker: A Novel About the Navajo Marines of World War II by Joseph Bruchac

“ Throughout World War II, in the conflict fought against Japan, Navajo code talkers were a crucial part of the U.S. effort, sending messages back and forth in an unbreakable code that used their native language. They braved some of the heaviest fighting of the war…yet their story remained classified for more than twenty years. “

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

“ With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje’s Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II.”

The Gallery by John Horne Burns

“ A daring and enduring novel—one of the first to look directly at gay life in the military—’The Gallery’ poignantly conveys the mixed feelings of the men and women who fought the war that made America a superpower. “

Gone to Soldiers by Marge Piercy

“ In a stunning tour-de-force, Marge Piercy has woven a tapestry of World War II, of six women and four men, who fought and died, worked and worried, and moved through the dizzying days of the war. “

The Great Fortu ne by Olivia Manning

“ Guy and Harriet Pringle, newly married, arrive in Bucharest in the autumn of 1939. The city they find is one of contrasts and rumours, on the edge with wavering loyalties and the tension of war, peopled with an international cast of characters, including the inimitable and eccentric Russian émigré Prince Yakimov. “

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Schaffer and Annie Barrows

“ January 1946: London is emerging from the shadow of the Second World War, and writer Juliet Ashton is looking for her next book subject. Who could imagine that she would find it in a letter from a man she’s never met, a native of the island of Guernsey, who has come across her name written inside a book by Charles Lamb….”

The Guns of Navarone by Alistair MacLean

“ An entire navy had tried to silence the guns of Navarone and failed. Full-scale attacks had been driven back. Now they were sending in just five men, each one a specialist in dealing death. “

Half Blood Blues by esi edugyan

“ The aftermath of the fall of Paris, 1940. Hieronymous Falk, a rising star on the cabaret scene, was arrested in a cafe and never heard from again. He was twenty years old. He was a German citizen. And he was black.”

HHhH by Laurent Binet

“ HHhH: ‘ Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydric,’, or ‘Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich.’ The most dangerous man in Hitler’s cabinet, Reinhard Heydrich was known as the “Butcher of Prague.” Heydrich seemed indestructible—until two men, a Slovak and a Czech recruited by the British secret service, killed him in broad daylight on a bustling street in Prague, and thus changed the course of History. “

The Investigation by J.M. Lee, Translated by Chi-Young Kim

“ Fukuoka Prison, 1944. Beyond the prison walls, the war rages. Inside, a man is found brutally murdered. What follows is a searing portrait of Korea before their civil war, and a testimony to the redemptive power of poetry. “

The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer

“ Paris, 1937. Andras Lévi, a Hungarian Jewish architecture student, arrives from Budapest with a scholarship, a single suitcase, and a mysterious letter he has promised to deliver to C. Morgenstern on the rue de Sévigné. “

Jackdaws by Ken Follett

“ D day is approaching. They don’t know where or when, but the Germans know it’ll be soon, and for Felicity ‘Flick’ Clairet, the stakes have never been higher. “

The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell, Translated by Charlotte Mandell

“ A former Nazi officer, Dr. Maximilien Aue has reinvented himself, many years after the war, as a middle-class family man and factory owner in France…Through the eyes of this cultivated yet monstrous man we experience in disturbingly precise detail the horrors of the Second World War and the Nazi genocide of the Jews. “

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

“ What if you could live again and again, until you got it right?…Does Ursula’s apparently infinite number of lives give her the power to save the world from its inevitable destiny? And if she can—will she? “

Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman

“ Life and Fate is an epic tale of a country told through the fate of a single family, the Shaposhnikovs. As the battle of Stalingrad looms, Grossman’s characters must work out their destinies in a world torn apart by ideological tyranny and war.”

A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True by Brigid Pasulka

“ Whimsical, wise, beautiful, magical, and sometimes even heartbreaking, A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True weaves together two remarkable stories, reimagining half a century of Polish history through the legacy of one unforgettable love affair. “

A Midnight Clear by William Wharton

“ Set in the Ardennes Forest on Christmas Eve 1944, Sergeant Will Knott and five other GIs are ordered close to the German lines to establish an observation post in an abandoned chateau. Here they play at being soldiers in what seems to be complete isolation. That is, until the Germans begin revealing their whereabouts …”

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

“ The Narrow Road to the Deep North is about the impossibility of love. At its heart is one day in a Japanese slave labour camp in August 1943. As the day builds to its horrific climax, Dorrigo Evans battles and fails in his quest to save the lives of his fellow POWs, a man is killed for no reason, and a love story unfolds. “

The Night Watch by Sarah Waters

“ Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked out streets, illicit liaisons, sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, The Night Watch is the work of a truly brilliant and compelling storyteller. This is the story of four Londoners—three women and a young man with a past, drawn with absolute truth and intimacy. “

A Pledge of Silence by Flora J. Solomon

“ When Margie Bauer joins the Army Nurse Corps in 1941, she is delighted to be assigned to Manila—the Pearl of the Orient. Though rumors of war circulate, she feels safe—the island is fortified, the airbases are ample, and the Filipino troops are well-trained. “

The Postmistress by Sarah Blake

“ What would happen if someone did the unthinkable—and didn’t deliver a letter? Filled with stunning parallels to today, The Postmistress is a sweeping novel about the loss of innocence of two extraordinary women-and of two countries torn apart by war. “

Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally

“ This is the extraordinary story of Oskar Schindler, who risked his life to protect Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland and who was transformed by the war into a man with a mission, a compassionate angel of mercy. “

A Separate Peace by John Knowles

“ Set at a boys boarding school in New England during the early years of World War II, A Separate Peace is a harrowing and luminous parable of the dark side of adolescence. “

The Seventh Cross by Anna Seghers

“ Written in 1939, first published in 1942… The Seventh Cross presented a still doubtful, naive America a first-hand account of life in Hitler’s Germany and of the horrors of the concentration camps. “

The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick

“ Depicting both the horrors of the Holocaust and the lifetime of emptiness that pursues a survivor, ‘The Shawl’ and ‘Rosa’ recall the psychological and emotional scars of those who suffered at the hands of the Nazis. “

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

“ Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore…we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut’s) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden. “

Small Island by Andrea Levy

“ Hortense Joseph arrives in London from Jamaica in 1948 with her life in her suitcase, her heart broken, her resolve intact. Her husband, Gilbert Joseph, returns from the war expecting to be received as a hero, but finds his status as a black man in Britain to be second class. “

Sophie’s Choice by William Styron

“ Three stories are told: a young Southerner wants to become a writer; a turbulent love-hate affair between a brilliant Jew and a beautiful Polish woman; and of an awful wound in that woman’s past—one that impels both Sophie and Nathan toward destruction. “

Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi

“ Trudi Montag is a Zwerg —a dwarf—short, undesirable, different, the voice of anyone who has ever tried to fit in. Eventually she learns that being different is a secret that all humans share—from her mother who flees into madness, to her friend Georg whose parents pretend he’s a girl, to the Jews Trudy harbors in her cellar. “

Suite française by Irène Némirovsky

“ Beginning in Paris on the eve of the Nazi occupation in 1940, Suite Française tells the remarkable story of men and women thrown together in circumstances beyond their control. “

The Sword of Honour Trilogy by Evelyn Waugh

“[The trilogy’s] central character is Guy Crouchback, head of an ancient but decayed Catholic family, who at first discovers new purpose in the challenge to defend Christian values against Nazi barbarism, but then gradually finds the complexities and cruelties of war too much for him. “

Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum

“ Combining a passionate, doomed love story, a vivid evocation of life during the war, and a poignant mother/daughter drama, Those Who Save Us is a profound exploration of what we endure to survive and the legacy of shame. “

A Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell

“ It is September 8, 1943, and fourteen-year-old Claudette Blum is learning Italian with a suitcase in her hand. She and her father are among the thousands of Jewish refugees scrambling over the Alps toward Italy, where they hope to be safe at last, now that the Italians have broken with Germany and made a separate peace with the Allies. “

The Tin Drum by Günter Grass

“ On his third birthday Oskar decides to stop growing. Haunted by the deaths of his parents and wielding his tin drum Oskar recounts the events of his extraordinary life; from the long nightmare of the Nazi era to his anarchic adventures in post-war Germany. “

The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies

“ From the acclaimed writer Peter Ho Davies comes an engrossing wartime love story set in the stunning landscape of North Wales during the final, harrowing months of World War II.”

When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka

“ Julie Otsuka’s commanding debut novel paints a portrait of the Japanese internment camps unlike any we have ever seen. With crystalline intensity and precision, Otsuka uses a single family to evoke the deracination ‘both physical and emotional’ of a generation of Japanese Americans. “

Children’s/Young Adult

Between shades of gray by ruta sepetys.

“ Lina is just like any other fifteen-year-old Lithuanian girl in 1941. She paints, she draws, she gets crushes on boys. Until one night when Soviet officers barge into her home, tearing her family from the comfortable life they’ve known.”

The Book Thief by Markus Zuzak

“ Set during World War II in Germany, Markus Zusak’s groundbreaking new novel is the story of Liesel Meminger, a foster girl living outside of Munich. Liesel scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist—books. “

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne

“ Berlin 1942. When Bruno returns home from school one day, he discovers that his belongings are being packed in crates. His father has received a promotion and the family must move from their home to a new house far far away, where there is no one to play with and nothing to do. “

The Chosen by Chaim Potok

“[ The Chosen is the] story of two fathers and two sons and the pressures on all of them to pursue the religion they share in the way that is best suited to each. And as the boys grow into young men, they discover in the other a lost spiritual brother, and a link to an unexplored world that neither had ever considered before. “

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

“ Oct. 11th, 1943—A British spy plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France. Its pilot and passenger are best friends. One of the girls has a chance at survival. The other has lost the game before it’s barely begun. “

Dust of Eden by Mariko Nagai

“‘ We lived under a sky so blue in Idaho right near the towns of Hunt and Eden but we were not welcomed there.’ In December 1941, thirteen year-old Mina Masako Tagawa and her Japanese-American family are sent from their home in Seattle to an internment camp in Idaho. What do you do when your home country treats you like an enemy?”

Flygirl by Sherri L. Smith

“Ida Mae Jones dreams of flight. Her daddy was a pilot and being black didn’t stop him from fulfilling his dreams. But her daddy’s gone now, and being a woman and being black are two strikes against her. “

Good Night, Mr. Tom by Michelle Magorian

“ When the Second World War breaks out, young Willie Beech is evacuated to the countryside. A sad, deprived child, he slowly begins to flourish under the care of kind old Tom Oakley. But then his cruel mother summons him back to war-torn London… “

Journey to Topaz: A Story of the Japanese-American Evacuation by Yoshiko Uchida

“ Like any 11-year-old, Yuki Sakane is looking forward to Christmas when her peaceful world is suddenly shattered by the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Uprooted from her home and shipped with thousands of West Coast Japanese Americans to a desert concentration camp called Topaz, Yuki and her family face new hardships daily. “

Mare’s War by Tanita S. Davis

“… somewhere on the road, Octavia and Tali discover there’s more to Mare than what you see. She was once a willful teenager who escaped her less-than-perfect life in the deep South and lied about her age to join the African American battalion of the Women’s Army Corps during World War II. “

Number the Stars by Lois Lowry

“ Ten-year-old Annemarie Johansen and her best friend Ellen Rosen often think of life before the war. It’s now 1943 and their life in Copenhagen is filled with school, food shortages, and the Nazi soldiers marching through town. “

Someone Named Eva by Joan M. Wolf

“ In 1942, eleven-year-old Milada is taken from her home in Lidice, Czechoslovakia, along with other blond, blue-eyed children to a Lebensborn center in Poland. There she is trained to be a ‘proper German’ for adoption by a German family, and all the while she struggles to remember her true identity. “

You Can Fly: The Tuskegee Airmen by Carole Boston Weatherford and Jeffery Boston Weatherford

“From training days in Alabama to combat on the front lines in Europe, this is the story of the Tuskegee Airmen, the groundbreaking African-American pilots of World War II. In vibrant second-person poems, Carole Boston Weatherford teams up for the first time with her son, artist Jeffery Weatherford. “

Straight-Up History

Americans in paris: life and death under nazi occupation 1940-1944 by charles glass.

“ When the German army marched into Paris on June 14, 1940, approximately 5,000 Americans remained in Paris. They had refused or been unable to leave for many different reasons; their actions during the course of the German occupation would prove to be just as varied. “

Brothers in Arms: The Epic Story of the 761st Tank Battalion, WWII’s Forgotten Heroes by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anthony Walton

“ A powerful wartime saga in the bestselling tradition of Flags of Our Fathers , Brothers in Arms recounts the extraordinary story of the 761st Tank Battalion, the first all-black armored unit to see combat in World War II. “

Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II by Madhusree Mukerjee

“ As journalist Madhusree Mukerjee reveals, at the same time that Churchill brilliantly opposed the barbarism of the Nazis, he governed India with a fierce resolve to crush its freedom movement and a profound contempt for native lives. “

Dirty Little Secrets of World War II: Military Information No One Told You about the Greatest, Most Terrible War in History by James F. Dunnigan and Albert A. Nofi

“ Dirty Little Secrets of World War II exposes the dark, irreverent, misunderstood, and often tragicomic aspects of military operations during World War II, many of them virtually unknown even to military buffs.”

Fighting for America: Black Soldiers—the Unsung Heroes of World War II by Christopher Moore

“ The African-American contribution to winning World War II has never been celebrated as profoundly as in Fighting for America . In this inspirational and uniquely personal tribute, the essential part played by black servicemen and -women in that cataclysmic conflict is brought home.”

Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II’s Greatest Rescue Mission by Hampton Sides

“ On January 28, 1945, 121 hand-selected U.S. troops slipped behind enemy lines in the Philippines. Their mission: March thirty rugged miles to rescue 513 POWs languishing in a hellish camp, among them the last survivors of the infamous Bataan Death March.”

The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II by Denise Kiernan

“ In The Girls of Atomic City , Denise Kiernan traces the astonishing story of these unsung WWII workers through interviews with dozens of surviving women and other Oak Ridge residents…this is history and science made fresh and vibrant.”

Harlem at War: The Black Experience in World War II by Nathan Brandt

“ In Harlem at War, Nat Brandt vividly recreates the desolation of black communities during World War II and examines the nation-wide conditions that led up to the Harlem riot of 1943. “

Hiroshima by John Hersey

“ On August 6, 1945, Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atom bomb ever dropped on a city. This book, John Hersey’s journalistic masterpiece, tells what happened on that day. “

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson

“ As that first year unfolds and the shadows deepen, the Dodds experience days full of excitement, intrigue, romance and ultimately, horror, when a climactic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitler’s true character and ruthless ambition. “

The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History by Robert M. Edsel

“ Focusing on the eleven-month period between D-Day and V-E Day, this fascinating account follows six Monuments Men and their impossible mission to save the world’s great art from the Nazis. “

Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War by Susan Southard

“ A powerful and unflinching account of the enduring impact of nuclear war, told through the stories of those who survived. “

The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang

“In December 1937, the Japanese army invaded the ancient city of Nanking, systematically raping, torturing, and murdering more than 300,000 Chinese civilians. This book tells the story from three perspectives: of the Japanese soldiers who performed it, of the Chinese civilians who endured it, and of a group of Europeans and Americans who refused to abandon the city and were able to create a safety zone that saved many. “

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany by William L. Shirer

“ The famed foreign correspondent and historian William L. Shirer, who had watched and reported on the Nazis since 1925, spent five and a half years sifting through this massive documentation. The result is a monumental study that has been widely acclaimed as the definitive record of one of the most frightening chapters in the history of mankind. “

The Rising Sun: The Decline & Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-45 by John Willard Toland

“ This Pulitzer Prize–winning history of World War II chronicles the dramatic rise and fall of the Japanese empire, from the invasion of Manchuria and China to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

The Second World War by John Keegan

“ In this comprehensive history, John Keegan explores both the technical and the human impact of the greatest war of all time. He focuses on five crucial battles and offers new insights into the distinctive methods and motivations of modern warfare. “

The Second World War by Winston S. Churchill

“ Winston Churchill was not only the war’s greatest leader, he was the free world’s singularly eloquent voice of defiance in the face of Nazi tyranny, and it’s that voice that animates this six-volume history. “

To Serve My Country, to Serve My Race: The Story of the Only African-American WACs Stationed Overseas During World War II by Brenda L. Moore

“ Despite the social, political, and economic restrictions imposed upon these African-American women in their own country, they were eager to serve, not only out of patriotism but out of a desire to uplift their race and dispel bigoted preconceptions about their abilities … Filled with compelling personal testimony based on extensive interviews, To Serve My Country is the first book to document the lives of these courageous pioneers.”

Winston’s War: Churchill, 1940-1945 by Max Hastings

“ A vivid and incisive portrait of Winston Churchill during wartime from acclaimed historian Max Hastings, Winston’s War captures the full range of Churchill’s endlessly fascinating character. “

The Zookeeper’s Wife by Diane Ackerman

“ When Germany invaded Poland, Stuka bombers devastated Warsaw—and the city’s zoo along with it. With most of their animals dead, zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski began smuggling Jews into empty cages. “

Biography, Autobiography, Memoir

All but my life: a memoir by gerda weissmann klein.

“ All But My Life is the unforgettable story of Gerda Weissmann Klein’s six-year ordeal as a victim of Nazi cruelty. “

Boy 30529: A Memoir by Felix Weinberg

“ In 1939 twelve-year-old Felix Weinberg fell into the hands of the Nazis. Imprisoned for most of his teenage life, Felix survived five concentration camps, including Terezin, Auschwitz, and Birkenau, barely surviving the Death March from Blechhammer in 1945. “

Code Talker: The First and Only Memoir By One of the Original Navajo Code Talkers of WWII by Chester Nez and Judith Schiess Avila

“ Although more than 400 Navajos served in the military during World War II as top-secret code talkers, even those fighting shoulder to shoulder with them were not told of their covert function…Of the original twenty-nine Navajo code talkers, only two are still alive. Chester Nez is one of them. “

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, Translated by Susan Massotty

“ The Diary of a Young Girl… continues to bring to life this young woman, who for a time survived the worst horrors the modern world had seen—and who remained triumphantly and heartbreakingly human throughout her ordeal. “

Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston

“ Farewell to Manzanar is the true story of one spirited Japanese-American family’s attempt to survive the indignities of forced detention—and of a native-born American child who discovered what it was like to grow up behind barbed wire in the United States. “

The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom by Corrie Ten Boom, John Sherrill, and Elizabeth Sherrill

“ Corrie ten Boom and her family became leaders in the Dutch Underground, hiding Jewish people in their home in a specially built room and aiding their escape from the Nazis. For their help, all but Corrie found death in a concentration camp. The Hiding Place is their story. “

Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician, August 6–September 30, 1945 by Michihiko Hachiya, Translated by Warner Wells

“ The late Dr. Michihiko Hachiya was director of the Hiroshima Communications Hospital when the world’s first atomic bomb was dropped on the city. Though his responsibilities in the appalling chaos of a devastated city were awesome, he found time to record the story daily, with compassion and tenderness. “

Honoring Sergeant Carter: A Family’s Journey to Uncover the Truth About an American Hero by Allene G. Carter and Robert L. Allen

“ President Clinton awarded the Medal of Honor to several black soldiers who served in World War II. Sergeant Edward A. Carter Jr. was among the recipients. Shocked to learn the extent of Carter’s service, Allene was determined to uncover both the truth about her father-in-law’s wartime record and why his official recognition was so long in coming. “

In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer by Irene Gut Opdyke and Jennifer Armstrong

“‘ You must understand that I did not become a resistance fighter, a smuggler of Jews, a defier of the SS and the Nazis all at once. One’s first steps are always small: I had begun by hiding food under a fence.’ An amazing, courageous, uplifting autobiography about a brave teenager who was not afraid to get involved.

I rena’s Children by Tilar J. Mazzeo

“ From the…author of The Widow Clicquot comes an extraordinary and gripping account of Irena Sendler—the ‘female Oskar Schindler’—who took staggering risks to save 2,500 children from death and deportation in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II. “

A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of WWII by Sarah Helm

“ Once rumored to have been the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s Miss Moneypenny, Vera Atkins climbed her way to the top in the Special Operations Executive, or SOE: Britain’s secret service created to help build up, organize, and arm the resistance in the Nazi-occupied countries. “

Night by Elie Wiesel, Translated by Marion Wiesel

“ Born into a Jewish ghetto in Hungary, as a child, Elie Wiesel was sent to the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. This is his account of that atrocity .”

Nisei Daughter by Monica Itoi Sone

“ With charm, humor, and deep understanding, a Japanese American woman tells how it was to grow up on Seattle’s waterfront in the 1930s and to be subjected to ‘relocation’ during World War II. “

The Periodic Table by Primo Levi

“The Periodic Table is largely a memoir of the years before and after Primo Levi’s transportation from his native Italy to Auschwitz as an anti-Facist partisan and a Jew.”

Red Tail Captured, Red Tail Free: Memoirs of a Tuskegee Airman and POW by Alexander Jefferson and Lewis Carlson

“ One of the few memoirs of combat in World War II by a distinguished African-American flier, [this book] is also perhaps the only account of the African-American experience in a German prison camp. Alexander Jefferson was one of 32 Tuskegee Airmen from the 332nd Fighter Group to be shot down defending a country that considered them to be second-class citizens. “

Spy Princess: The life of Noor Inayat Khan by Shrabani Basu

“ This is the remarkable biography of Noor Inayat Khan, code named ‘Madeleine.’ The first woman wireless transmitter in occupied France during WWII, she was trained by Britain’s SOE and assumed the most dangerous resistance post in underground Paris.”

Tuskegee Airman: The Biography of Charles E. McGee: Air Force Fighter Combat Record Holder by Charlene E. McGee Smith

“ Colonel Charles E. McGee fought in World War II, in Korea and in Vietnam. He holds the record for the highest three-war total of fighter com-bat missions of any pilot in US Air Force history. His military service began as one of the Tuskegee Airmen in the 332nd, famed pioneers who fought racial prejudices to fly and fight for their country in WWII. “

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand

“ On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane’s bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard. “

The Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America’s Greatest Female Spy by Judith L. Pearson

“ Virginia Hall left comfortable Baltimore roots of privilege in 1931 to follow her dream of becoming a Foreign Service Officer. She watched as Hitler rolled into Poland, then France, and she decided to work for the British Special Operations Executive .”

A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary by Anonymous, Translated by Philip Boehm

“ For eight weeks in 1945, as Berlin fell to the Russian army, a young woman kept a daily record of life in her apartment building and among its residents. The anonymous author depicts her fellow Berliners in all their humanity, as well as their cravenness, corrupted first by hunger and then by the Russians. “

Graphic Novels/Memoirs

Maus i: a survivor’s tale by art spiegelman.

“ A story of a Jewish survivor of Hitler’s Europe and his son, a cartoonist who tries to come to terms with his father’s story and history itself. “

Onward Towards our Noble Deaths by Shigeru Mizuki, Translated by Jocelyne Allen

“ Shigeru Mizuki is the preeminent figure of Gekiga manga and one of the most famous working cartoonists in Japan today… Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths is his first book to be translated into English and is a semi-autobiographical account of the desperate final weeks of a Japanese infantry unit at the end of WorldWar II. “

Truth: Red, White, and Black by Robert Morales and Kyle Baker

“W riter Morales pursues [the idea of Captain America] and also draws inspiration from U.S. government experiments in the 1930s that left unwitting African-Americans infected with syphilis, leading to many deaths. Beginning his story in 1940, Morales incisively depicts the racism his various African-American characters confront both in civilian life and in the military.”

If this list isn’t enough, we have even more posts on World War II books available for you!

You Might Also Like

How a mysterious illness broke apart a family

In “Forces of Nature,” Gina DeMillo Wagner writes about growing up in the shadow of her brother’s illness.

Death is on our minds. Four years into a pandemic that killed millions and left little room for collective mourning, it feels as though we remain in a long season of grief. That sentiment is reflected in the glut of recent memoirs that grapple with bereavement, as if many writers had spent their days in isolation reflecting on what else they had lost. Among them is Gina DeMillo Wagner, who captures the complexity of grieving a sibling in “ Forces of Nature: A Memoir of Family, Loss, and Finding Home ,” a moving recollection of growing up with a brother with a disability and absent parents.

Wagner’s elder brother, Alan, who died in 2016 at the age of 43, had been diagnosed as a child with Prader-Willi syndrome, a rare genetic disease that impacts both metabolism and behavior. Although his body grew to reflect his age, Alan’s psychological development slowed during the siblings’ childhood in Atlanta, leaving him almost entirely dependent on others. Though little was known about the disease during Alan’s childhood, symptoms of his illness were evident throughout his life. Sweeping in unpredictably, those symptoms overwhelmed Wagner’s mother, a housewife. Though it is impossible to diagnose exactly what lies behind a divorce, it is easy to imagine that the weight of Alan’s illness proved too much for his parents to bear together. Their split, which resulted in the absence of the author’s father and a yawning emotional gap from her mother, runs through Wagner’s life like a fault line.

“The forces that create faults are compression, movement, expansion, and gravity,” she writes, employing a metaphor that recurs in the book. “Whenever something is under pressure, weighted down, vibrating, or grating against itself, trying to move in opposite directions — things crack. Fractures occur. Destruction. New geographies are formed.”

The new family geography that arose after the split found Gina taking on the household responsibilities to fill in for the parental lack. Alan was prone to overeating and volatile moods (people with Prader-Willi prove nearly insatiable and lack impulse control), and Gina, in her telling, often found herself on the receiving end of his destructive rage. We cannot always recognize trauma while we are living through it, and you get the feeling that, long after the fact, Wagner is hesitant to call what she lived through traumatic even as she relives harrowing scenes on the page. It may be in part due to the nature of Alan’s illness; childlike on his best days but swelling with extra-human strength when enraged, he could not be held fully responsible for the pain he inflicted on his sister.

She does not fault him for the volatility his disability created, instead looking to the natural world to draw parallels, especially the creation of the Rocky Mountains, a region she now calls home. “I think about the core attributes of a person, their own personal bedrock,” she writes. “Their personalities, their fundamental traits seem solid unless acted upon dramatically by some outside force.” In Alan’s case, that external pressure was from the patrilineally heritable disease. For Wagner herself, the outside forces are numerous: her brother’s rage, her mother’s neglect, a school counselor who recognizes something is wrong in the family. When the pressure eventually exerts itself too intensely, Wagner decides to leave her family before even finishing high school, estranging herself for decades to gain control over her own life.

All this time later, there’s a palpable melancholia as Wagner works through her brother’s death and the process of mourning a person she loved dearly, despite the injury and anguish he caused her. “No one talks about what grief looks like when the relationship you lost was fraught,” she writes. “No one admits that a relationship with someone who is dead can be just as complicated as the relationship was when they were alive. There was suffering then, and there is suffering now.”

With a tinge of survivor’s guilt, Wagner ruminates on Alan’s last days, seemingly looking to ensure that her absence from his life did not, in a roundabout way, end it. Yet it’s hard to know what assurances might assuage her. Wagner is reluctant to accept the explanation that doctors give her of natural causes, a reluctance that matches the uncertainty that relatives of those with rare diseases face when so little is known about their loved one’s medical condition.

Ultimately, instead of finding greater answers to Alan’s death, Wagner lands in the uncomfortable position of having to confront the complicated choices she made in removing herself from the family: “The deeper question is not whether Alan could have survived longer, but how did I survive all those years?”

It’s a question that readers themselves might ask as Wagner retells the story of her childhood from the vantage point of an adult reuniting with her family for her brother’s funeral. Faced with her parents in the same space again, she finds herself navigating new family fault lines. Vacillating between reflective adult observations and recollections from childhood, she also reckons with her present: Could she have created a happy family of her own had the mother of a high school friend not witnessed her pain and taken her in as a teenager, providing a path for escape?

The memoir thus becomes a lovely meditation on how families are formed within hostile landscapes. Wagner is a talented stylist, limited only by an inability to explain the inexplicable — in this case, less her brother’s rare disease than her parents’ behavior. She contemplates what might have been had her mother accepted more responsibility, had her father taken a greater role in their upbringing. “Maybe his death was no one’s fault,” she writes. “Just as the abuse was never our fault, his or mine.”

In the end, this is not a story of what-ifs but rather what-nows. With the earthshaking news of Alan’s death, the shape of Wagner’s own life becomes clearer — in her metaphor, it is like a landscape, which “forms a complete picture, even with its holes and valleys and rifts and green and blue debris.” From above, she writes, you can make sense of it in a way impossible on the ground. It’s this bird’s-eye perspective that provides both Wagner and her readers some much needed closure.

Courtney Tenz writes at the intersection of conflict and culture, covering women’s rights, the arts and European travel.

Forces of Nature

A Memoir of Family, Loss, and Finding Home

By Gina DeMillo Wagner

Running Wild. 310 pp. $19.99

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A new book traces the life of Fu Pei-mei, who brought Chinese food to the world

Scott Simon

Michelle T. King's new book is about a pioneering cook who brought Chinese food to the world, Fu Pei-mei. NPR's Scott Simon talks with King about her and about the book, "Chop Fry Watch Learn."

Copyright © 2024 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Are Plants Intelligent? If So, What Does That Mean for Your Salad?

A new book, “The Light Eaters,” looks at how plants sense the world and the agency they have in their own lives.

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By Elizabeth A. Harris

Zoë Schlanger was a reporter covering climate change — a daily onslaught of floods, fires and other natural disasters — when she started wading into botany journals to relax.

There, she found something that surprised her: Researchers were debating whether plants might have an intelligence of their own.

Take corn, for example. It is one of several types of plants that can identify a caterpillar’s species by its saliva and send out plumes of chemical compounds into the air, summoning the insect’s predator. Alerted to the caterpillar’s presence by these compounds, a parasitic wasp arrives and destroys it, protecting the corn.

“One of the big debates is whether or not there’s any form of intention with plants and whether you need intention for something to have intelligence,” Schlanger said. “But one could argue that it doesn’t even matter if you can find intention in plants. What matters is watching what they actually do. And what they do is make decisions in real time and plan for the future.”

Schlanger spent the next several years exploring plant behavior for her book, “The Light Eaters,” which was published this month. On a recent walk through Central Park — past hydrangeas, hellebores, hyacinths and a Broadway softball league game between team “Hamilton” and team “The Lion King” — Schlanger described some of the astonishing things plants can do, and how learning more about them has informed her work reporting on climate change, which she now does for The Atlantic.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

What are some surprising things plants can do?

I am most drawn to the ways that plants manipulate animals to their benefit.

Yellow monkey flowers are able to lie to bees about how much pollen they have in their flowers to dupe them into showing up. Bees have this screening process where they’re sampling the volatile chemicals coming off the flowers, and those chemicals will indicate how much pollen is there for them. The monkey flowers have come up with a way to not have to go through the very expensive, energetic work of making all this pollen, but just emitting the volatile chemicals. The bee shows up and there is nothing there for it, but the flower gets pollinated anyway.

Or there’s the whole world of sexually deceptive orchids, which I think is so cool. There are some that grow one really unusual petal: this long strand, with a little bulb at the end of it. Male wasps will arrive and cling to it because it’s exuding almost the exact same pheromone as a female wasp.

I like it when they summon a predator. That’s just crazy.

Back in the ‘90s, researchers realized that corn and tomatoes were able to sample the saliva of the caterpillar eating them, and then synthesize chemicals that summon the exact parasitic wasp that would come and inject the caterpillars with their larva. So the wasp comes, puts loads of larvae inside of the caterpillars. The larvae hatch and eat the caterpillars from the inside out and then glue their cocoons to the outside of the caterpillar. So then you just have these husks of caterpillars, covered in wasp cocoons.

Yeah, it’s a very creepy, bristly image. But the plant is trying to save itself. It’s eliminating a certain number of these caterpillars by summoning the exact predator to come destroy them. You can think of that as a plant using a tool. I mean, I don’t know about your feed, but mine is full of videos of things like crows using sticks as tools.

The algorithm has found you!

Absolutely. And obviously these crows are brilliant for doing that, but then what does it mean when plants are doing essentially the same thing, but to living organisms? They’re releasing chemicals that cause an animal to do something. Does that animal believe it’s doing this of its own free will? Is this a zombification of other animals, or is it more of a collaborative mutual exchange where the wasp gets something out of it? It’s hard to tell the difference between manipulation and collaboration in nature.

When scientists talk about “intelligence” in plants, what do they mean?

There are all of these calculations plants are constantly making by taking in every aspect of their environment and adjusting their lives accordingly, and it starts to look an awful lot like what we might consider intelligence — in a totally alien life form. That’s kind of how you have to treat it. Intelligence won’t show up in the way we expect ourselves to be intelligent. It’ll show up in ways that are evolutionarily appropriate for plants.

So no one is saying the plant is going to write a poem or do your math homework?

Not yet! Although researchers who study plant communication talk about syntax in plant communication and, in a way, sentence structure. But they’re talking about chemistry, chemical compounds floating in the air that have meaning.

What about the way plants sense the world? Do they interact with sound?

There’s some research happening now where scientists are playing tones for plants and realizing certain tones make plants produce more of certain compounds. There’s a tone that, if played for enough time, will make broccoli ramp up its antioxidants. In alfalfa sprouts, other tones will cause the plant to produce more vitamin C. One could see how — if they figured this out better — you could adjust the nutrition content of crops just by playing tones.

There’s also a whole world of playing tones to plants that causes them to produce more of their own pesticide, which is interesting when you think about how much pesticide we use to grow our food crops.

Have you changed your own behavior after spending so much time thinking about this? Do you have trouble eating salad now?

Obviously we’re animals that need to eat plants. There’s no way around that. But there is a way of imagining a future with agricultural practices and harvesting practices that are more tuned into the life style of the plant, the things it’s capable of and its proclivities.

This opens up the world of plant ethics. What does our world look like if we include plants in a moral imagination? There are lots of cultures that are already based on this. Robin Wall Kimmerer (author of “ Braiding Sweetgrass ”) writes a lot about this, how Indigenous science leaves a lot more room for questions about plants that are centered on respect and mutual interest.

What do you want people to take away from this book?

In thinking about plant intelligence, what we’re really thinking about is how much plants are active participants in their own life. They have some sense of agency, even if it doesn’t look anything like our own agency. I think that is really humbling. Everything wants to keep living. That has really helped me come back to climate reporting with more of a sense of what we stand to lose from climate change. Every single species is this ingenious biological feat that would be so foolish to extinguish.

  More about Elizabeth A. Harris

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

The complicated, generous life  of Paul Auster, who died on April 30 , yielded a body of work of staggering scope and variety .

“Real Americans,” a new novel by Rachel Khong , follows three generations of Chinese Americans as they all fight for self-determination in their own way .

“The Chocolate War,” published 50 years ago, became one of the most challenged books in the United States. Its author, Robert Cormier, spent years fighting attempts to ban it .

Joan Didion’s distinctive prose and sharp eye were tuned to an outsider’s frequency, telling us about ourselves in essays that are almost reflexively skeptical. Here are her essential works .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

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Book Review: Anonymous public servants are the heart of George Stephanopoulos’ ‘Situation Room’

This cover image released by Grand Central Publishing shows “The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis” by George Stephanapoulos with Lisa Dickey. (Grand Central Publishing via AP)

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The biggest challenge for an author tackling the history of the Situation Room, the basement room of the White House where some of the biggest intelligence crises have been handled in recent decades, is the room itself. As a setting, it’s pretty underwhelming.

In “The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis,” George Stephanopoulos describes how the room — actually a series of rooms — for much of its history didn’t live up to its reputation in popular imagination or media. The centerpiece of it, as Stephanopoulos writes, had “all the charm of a cardboard box.”

But what keeps readers engaged in Stephanopoulos’ history isn’t any behind the scenes schematics or technology. This isn’t a Tom Clancy novel, though it moves along as briskly as one. Instead, it’s the stories Stephanopoulos and Lisa Dickey share of the normally nameless and faceless public servants, the duty officers who have staffed the center since its inception during John F. Kennedy’s presidency.

Stephanopoulos, a political commentator and ABC anchor who worked in the Clinton White House, wisely zeroes in on a single crisis during each of 12 presidencies during the Situation Room’s history. Along the way, he reveals much about the differing management styles of the nation’s presidents and offers plenty of interesting pieces of history.

This includes the granular level of detail Lyndon B. Johnson sought in regular calls to the Situation Room late at night or early in the morning. The book offers a glimpse at the frenzied conversations that took place following Ronald Reagan’s shooting in 1981.

It should come as no surprise that the most riveting chapter centers around the moment that led to the most widely seen photo of the “Sit Room” — the killing of Osama bin Laden.

Stephanopoulos reveals that the photo — which showed former President Barack Obama in a cramped conference room receiving updates on the raid on the terrorist leader’s compound — could have looked a lot different. A larger room was available, but officials were worried about losing the audiovisual link if they tried moving it from the cramped room.

The duty officers whose stories are at the heart of the book are portrayed as apolitical figures, with one saying they “serve in silence.” Stephanopoulos’ book is a fitting tribute to them.

AP book reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews

Kristi Noem has admitted the Kim Jong Un part of her book isn't true but she read it for her audiobook anyway

• South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem's forthcoming book incorrectly said she had met with Kim Jong Un.
• After the passage leaked before publication, she said she asked the book's publisher remove it.
• She did her own narration for the audiobook. Why didn't she catch the error then?

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem may have been caught fibbing.

The rising Republican politician claimed last week she ordered changes to her soon-to-be-released book, "No Going Back: The Truth on What's Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward," after learning it falsely said she met with North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un.

"I remember when I met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, I'm sure he underestimated me having no clue about my experience staring down little tyrants. I've been a children's pastor after all," Noem wrote in her book about an interaction with the North Korean leader that never happened, as Politico reported last week.

CBS News' " Face the Nation " host Margaret Brennan pressed Noem on Sunday about the false passage in her book.

"Did you meet Kim Jong Un?" Brennan asked the governor.

"I'm not going to talk about my specific meetings with world leaders, I'm just not going to do that," Noem said. "This anecdote shouldn't have been in the book, and as soon as it was brought to my attention, I made sure that that was adjusted."

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Later Sunday, Noem's book publisher released a statement. "At the request of Governor Noem, we are removing a passage regarding Kim Jong Un from her book No Going Back, upon reprint of the print edition and as soon as technically possible on the audio and ebook editions," it said.

In other words, the audiobook version of Noem's memoir narrated by the governor herself will have to be edited as well, meaning Noem read the false North Korea statement aloud for the recording without correcting it.

A representative from Noem's office did not respond to Business Insider's question about why the governor didn't report the error sooner. CBS News asked Noem a similar question during their interview, leading the governor to accuse the host of treating her "differently than every other person" she's spoken with on the show.

The rollout for Noem's forthcoming book has been a disaster.

The Guardian obtained an early copy of Noem's book in late April, and revealed that Noem wrote about shooting her family's 14-month-old dog in a gravel pit.

She's since defended the passage, adding that she recently also killed three horses. Noem has also said that President Joe Biden's dog, Commander, should be put down after it reportedly bit several Secret Service agents.

The Daily Beast reported on May 3 that sources close to former President Donald Trump said Noem's recent negative attention effectively disqualified her from becoming his vice presidential running mate, calling it "political suicide."

But a fundraiser in Mar-a-Lago over the weekend, Trump was recorded saying she was "somebody that I love."

Watch: Inside Kim Jong Un's bulletproof train loaded with weapons and 'lady conductors'

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French government says Kristi Noem lied about cancelling meeting with Macron

A French official said there is no record of a scheduled meeting with the South Dakota governor – nor had they invited her

The French government has joined the chorus of detractors taking aim at the South Dakota governor Kristi Noem’s political autobiography No Going Back , which many now see as having eliminated her chances of being Donald Trump’s vice-presidential selection.

Days after Noem removed a passage claiming she had met with the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un, officials at the Élysée Palace in Paris are questioning a passage that describes a cancelled meeting with the French president, Emmanuel Macron.

According to NBC News , Noem claims in her book that she cancelled a planned meeting between her and Macron in November after she accused him of making “pro-Hamas” comments.

“While in Paris, I was slated to meet with French president Emmanuel Macron,” Noem wrote. “However, the day before we were to meet, he made what I considered a very pro-Hamas and anti-Israel comment to the press. So I decided to cancel.”

Yet a French official told the outlet there is no record of a scheduled meeting with Noem – nor had they invited her.

“Following his anti-Israel comments, she chose to cancel,” Noem’s spokesperson, Ian Fury, told NBC. Fury added that “the governor was invited to sit in President Macron’s box for the Armistice Day parade at Arc de Triomphe” – a ceremony that took place on 16 November.

Fury said that Macron had not attended, though Associated Press news video suggests he did. Noem had been in Paris in November 2023 to speak at the Worldwide Freedom Initiative conference.

While Noem does not describe what Macron’s comments were that she objected to, her office pointed to his remarks urging Israel to stop bombing Gaza while also acknowledging “the right of Israel to protect itself and react”.

The Guardian has reached out to Noem’s office for clarification.

Last week, Noem acknowledged that she “should not have put [an] anecdote in the book” in which she described meeting Kim Jong-un – and feeling underestimated by him – because that purported encounter with the North Korean dictator never happened.

Nonetheless, she later insisted she had “met with many, many world leaders” and had “travelled around the world”.

An excerpt from the book lists a number of world leaders whom Noem had met with while serving in Congress, including the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, Jordan’s King Abdullah II, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the former UK prime minister Boris Johnson.

Damaging embellishments are hardly unusual to the political class. Hillary Clinton came out on the wrong side of a fact-checking drama in 2008 when she was unsuccessfully running for the Democratic presidential nomination and claimed she arrived in Bosnia “under sniper fire” and had to run with her head down.

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But Noem may have done more damage to her standing by repeating a 20-year-old story about shooting dead a working dog on her ranch. She explained that the 14-month-old wirehaired pointer , Cricket, did not point out game on animal hunts, killed a neighbor’s chickens, and acted aggressively toward her family.

Noem also described shooting dead the family’s billy goat, which the governor said “loved to chase” her children and would “knock them down and butt them”, leaving them “terrified”.

It took Noem two shots to kill off the goat, which also had a “wretched smell”, Noem wrote.

Criticism has been heaped on Noem from both sides of the political spectrum over the dog, but less so the goat.

It was reported last weekend that Noem left a political fundraiser lunch at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort early last weekend as the former president offered onstage introductions of various contenders to be his running mate in November’s rematch with Joe Biden, who is seeking re-election.

“She had a rough couple of days,” Trump told Spectrum News 1 Wisconsin last week. “I will say that.”

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Coordinates of Elektrostal in decimal degrees

Coordinates of elektrostal in degrees and decimal minutes, utm coordinates of elektrostal, geographic coordinate systems.

WGS 84 coordinate reference system is the latest revision of the World Geodetic System, which is used in mapping and navigation, including GPS satellite navigation system (the Global Positioning System).

Geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude) define a position on the Earth’s surface. Coordinates are angular units. The canonical form of latitude and longitude representation uses degrees (°), minutes (′), and seconds (″). GPS systems widely use coordinates in degrees and decimal minutes, or in decimal degrees.

Latitude varies from −90° to 90°. The latitude of the Equator is 0°; the latitude of the South Pole is −90°; the latitude of the North Pole is 90°. Positive latitude values correspond to the geographic locations north of the Equator (abbrev. N). Negative latitude values correspond to the geographic locations south of the Equator (abbrev. S).

Longitude is counted from the prime meridian ( IERS Reference Meridian for WGS 84) and varies from −180° to 180°. Positive longitude values correspond to the geographic locations east of the prime meridian (abbrev. E). Negative longitude values correspond to the geographic locations west of the prime meridian (abbrev. W).

UTM or Universal Transverse Mercator coordinate system divides the Earth’s surface into 60 longitudinal zones. The coordinates of a location within each zone are defined as a planar coordinate pair related to the intersection of the equator and the zone’s central meridian, and measured in meters.

Elevation above sea level is a measure of a geographic location’s height. We are using the global digital elevation model GTOPO30 .

Elektrostal , Moscow Oblast, Russia